top of page
Search

Abortion in Poland, law and practice


Abortion has been for a long time an important topic of political debates, press articles, and family discussions in Poland. The said topic clearly divides our society into two parts: those supporting the sacredness and dignity of human life from the moment of conception until natural death, and those who are proponents of broad availability of abortion services, yet until now have not been mentioning women’s right to abortion. This division reflects the division of the Polish society into two parts: one that is leftist and liberal, as well as one that cherishes traditional patriotic and Christian values. The polarisation of the society, which historically dates back to the end of the 18th century, is deepening. It prevents the state’s development, distorts social peace and the comfort of everyday life. The outcome of the approaching presidential elections, and later of the parliamentary ones, may translate into amendments to the law in force.

In 1956 in the Soviet Union and satellite communist countries, including Poland, extreme liberal abortion law was introduced, allowing to perform this procedure for so-called social reasons, practically on demand. This may seem odd, but more or less at that time similar law was adopted in the liberal West. A couple of hundred thousand abortions would take place in Poland every year.

In 1993, in the years of return to freedom and democracy, new abortion law was adopted, which in the first version referred to a conceived child. A couple of years later it was changed to that referring to pregnancy and its “termination”.[1] Abortion was allowed as an exception in cases where an illness or malformation of the foetus was established or suspected, where pregnancy posed a threat to the mother’s health or life, and when it was highly probable that the pregnancy resulted from a criminal act. The number of abortions performed officially sank to a couple of hundred annually, the majority of which were so-called eugenic abortions, whereas termination of pregnancy resulting from a criminal act was the rarest one. Contrary to predictions formulated by liberal circles, the new statute did not lead to a massive surge in the frequency of illegal abortions and deaths of mothers. The number of illegal abortions was assessed at 20-30 thousand annually. The number indicated by liberal female organisations, which was ten times higher, was not based on any credible foundations. What did not rise was the number of spontaneous abortions, pregnancies in under-aged women or infanticide, which was feared by liberal circles. On the contrary, upon its introduction what started to decrease more rapidly were: the frequency of premature births, the indicators of perinatal deaths of foetuses and newborns. The analysis of women’s deaths related to pregnancy and labour conducted scrupulously by the Institute of Mother and Child [Pl. Instytut Matki i Dziecka] indicated that the annual number of those deaths amounted to 3-5 in 100 000 live births.[2] This indicator was and still is better than in the majority of European countries and reflects a good level of maternity care in Poland. No death of a mother due to abortion was determined. The reduction of the number of abortions caused by the law in force thus contributed to the improvement of the procreative health of Polish women.[3]  

Since the year 1993, Polish governments have changed several times. Left-wing governments have tried to change abortion law so as to increase the availability of that procedure, but eventually the Act of 1993 has been in force to this day with one amendment. The Constitutional Tribunal in the ruling delivered in 1997 stated that attempts at reintroducing abortion for so-called social reasons “infringe the constitutional guarantees of human life, while the legal order must respect the inviolable and innate human rights, including above all the right to life”.[4] In the year 2020, the aforementioned Constitutional Tribunal held that abortion due to an unfavourable prenatal diagnosis is illegal.[5] Soon thereafter the Sejm adopted the Act for Life supporting – although definitely in an insufficient manner – the situation of families in which an innate illness or defect of an unborn child has been determined. Such families receive financial aid, have easier access to medical and psychological care. What has been established is a network of centres which provide perinatal palliative care for an ill child before and after its birth, for its mother and its entire family. In 2022, 161 abortions were performed within the public health protection system.[6] In 2019, that is before the judgment of the Constitutional Tribunal, that number amounted to 1110. What remains unknown is the number of pharmacological abortions induced by medication imported from abroad. This activity, although it is unlawful, is not prosecuted by functionaries of the justice system.

Liberals are still trying to take advantage of all possibilities and events to make access to abortion easier. In the year 2022, two mothers died in Poland due to sceptic miscarriage. Those cases were used for propaganda purposes. It was recognised that this would be the right moment to link those tragic events with the ruling of the Constitutional Tribunal concerning the prohibition against eugenic abortion, although it made no logical sense. Opinions were expressed in leftist media that the doctors taking care of those mothers had not acted properly out of fear that they would be accused of performing illegal abortions. It was claimed they had been deprived of the possibility to act properly, had been “frozen” by the abortion law in force. What encouraged Polish liberal circles, left-wing parties and feminist organisations to take advantage of those deaths for political purposes were recent events in Ireland. A similar death of a mother and the wave of social protests that followed it led to the adoption of a new abortion law which made access to abortion easier.[7]

What took place in Poland were loud protest marches, even street riots, attacks on the building of the Sejm, disruptions of masses in churches. What was demanded was an amendment to the abortion law. Yet, the said actions did not attain their goal, failed to gain social support, and soon came to an end. The analysis of the clinical management in the said cases indicated that the cause of the mothers’ deaths was improper clinical management.

Abortion due to the threat to the mother’s life is becoming unnecessary in modern obstetrics thanks to the progress currently taking place in the field of medical technology, improvement of diagnostic methods and treatment. Giving birth to a child by an ill mother does not pose a harm to her greater than that posed by abortion. Medicine can handle well different illnesses of women (diabetes, heart defects, asthma), and carrying the pregnancy in the coexistence of those illnesses does not present a challenge. It is similar in the cases of severe complications of pregnancy (haemorrhage, hypertension) where medicine has at its disposal increasingly effective methods of prevention, early diagnosis and successful treatment. Termination of pregnancy when this is necessary due to a threat to the mother, for instance due to malignant tumour, may be successfully postponed to a time when the child is able to live outside the mother’s body, and intensive therapy of children born prematurely, after the 23rd week of pregnancy, makes it highly possible for them to survive and develop properly.

A severe complication of pregnancy appears suddenly, unexpectedly, as was the case in the instances discussed above. The death of the foetus that may occur while saving the mother’s life is not an abortion under these circumstances, as it does not comply with the definition of abortion, which embraces a direct action aimed at killing an embryo or a foetus.[8] Also Christian ethics regards the child’s death while saving the mother’s life as an acceptable consequence in accordance with the principle of a double effect or as an action in necessity. Hence, to avoid mothers’ deaths due to severe complications of pregnancy, it is necessary to improve the quality of obstetric care as well as to train medical personnel to correctly interpret the binding law, and not to liberalise the abortion law. Unfortunately, the view is still expressed in Polish liberal circles – which contradicts medical facts – that abortion is necessary to save the mother’s life. Obviously, this is supposed to present this procedure in a positive light as one that saves life – not as one that takes life – as a certain “medication” for complications of pregnancy.

It is hard not to agree with the view presented in the Dublin Declaration published in 2012. The Committee for Excellence in Maternal Healthcare agreed that purposeful destruction of an unborn child is never necessary to save the life of its mother. The list has been signed by 1013 specialists from all over the world.[9] The doctors who signed the Dublin Declaration also uphold a fundamental difference between medical treatment, which in some cases may result in the loss of life of an unborn child, and the purposeful killing of a child, i.e. abortion.

Following the parliamentary elections, which took place in the autumn of 2023, power was taken over by liberal, peasant and left-wing circles. One of the first legislative actions that were announced was going to be the liberalisation of the abortion rules. Four draft acts have been proposed, yet none of them stands a chance to enter into force, as the Sejm does not have the required majority, and President Andrzej Duda, whose term of office ends in the summer of 2025, has announced his veto.

It was decided that the availability of abortion should be made easier in a different way. The Minister for Health published a document “Guidelines on the applicable legal regulations concerning access to the procedure for terminating pregnancy”, which did not constitute, as it could not, an amendment to the law in force, and according to some commentators, was in breach of the law.[10] It contained a categorical formulation of recommendations for doctors concerning the performance of abortions in hospitals. What was thus aimed was the replacement of eugenic abortion, which has been forbidden by the Constitutional Tribunal, with the possibility to obtain – practically at request – an abortion for reasons of the mother’s poor mental health caused by defects or an illness of an unborn child or by other, also short-term, transient psychological or psychiatric problems, depression, fear related to being pregnant.

The mother, after receiving a proper referral from a psychiatrist, should go to the gynaecologist, who must respect the said referral, without relying on additional opinions of doctors or holding a case conference, and immediately perform an abortion. It is announced in the guidelines that the doctor may not assess the stage of an illness, may not consider whether a mental disorder and its severity is so serious as to put the life of an unborn child on the line. The outcome of a single psychiatric consultation should be binding on the gynaecologist. It is forbidden to treat a psychiatric illness of the pregnant woman. Abortion should be the only method of “treatment” in such cases. The Deputy Minister for Health has announced that cases would be verified in which doctors invoked the conscience clause.[11]

The man, the father of an unborn child, is not at all mentioned in the guidelines, he is not asked about his opinion.

The Executive Board of the Polish Psychiatric Association and the national consultant in that field of medicine have issued their own “Guidelines” for psychiatrists “concerning the issuance of a medical certificate declaring a threat to the life or health of a pregnant woman as a premise for legal termination of pregnancy”. According to psychiatrists participating in discussions concerning this issue, the aforementioned guidelines were not based on any scientific data, they presented the current legal regulations in a selective and superficial manner, and in some aspects in a clearly biased manner. Psychiatrists most often indicate on certificates issued by them adaptation disorders of pregnancy, that is, a situation which is difficult to define as a premise for obtaining an abortion.

Also gynaecologists, numerous associations of doctors, including medical chambers, are rebelling against – in their opinion – unlawful interference of administrative authorities with the standard of care. In reaction to that, the national consultant was replaced, directors of hospitals were fired, and those “resistant” who do not enthusiastically implement the guidelines receive huge financial fines.

There are hospitals in Poland where the “guidelines” of the Ministry of Health are fully implemented. Sick and healthy children are aborted in the second trimester and shortly before the due date for the so-called psychiatric reasons. What is applied in order to avoid a live birth is the procedure for killing the foetus before it exits the womb by means of an intracardiac potassium chloride injection, which is very painful to the child. Termination of pregnancy in those cases takes the form of a direct attack on the child, aiming at its annihilation. The method of killing a human by means of an intracardiac injection has the worst associations in Poland, as it was applied in German concentration camps during World War II. Prof. Piotr Sieroszewski, the national consultant in the field of obstetrics and gynaecology, has spoken out against such practices.[12] In his opinion, pregnancy may be shortened in such cases by performing a Caesarean section and saving the child. Multiple medical organisations have protested, the Polish Episcopate for Bioethics has expressed a negative opinion.[13]

Opinions are voiced that the procedure described above is not in its substance termination of pregnancy, that is, the physiological process that ensures the proper development of the foetus and the birth of a child, but it is a direct murder of a child before its birth. Hence, its acceptability may not be derived from the Polish abortion law. There are also opinions that due to the existing legal provisions, taking the life of an unborn child that is able to live outside the mother’s body is unacceptable.

It seems that it is necessary for legal provisions to distinguish between the notions of “abortion” and “termination of pregnancy”. The notion of “abortion” does not exist in the Polish legal provisions.

The legal provisions concerning the procedure for terminating pregnancy (or abortion) have been recently the subject of heated discussions, even in public spaces, and of political battle. On the one hand, there is a certain part of the society for which abortion is a regular medical procedure, proof of women’s independence and their reproductive rights, a means to egoistically avoid unpleasant consequences of irresponsible sexual behaviour. However, a greater majority are people concerned about mass killing of innocent children, emotional, psychological[14] as well as physical mutilation of women during abortions performed on a mass scale, and the demographic catastrophe inflicted by these factors. 


[3] Miller C.: Aborcja, medycyna i etyka – fakty, mity, wyzwania. Med. Prakt. wyd. spec.: Wspołczesne wyzwania etyki medycznej, 2024; e83–e94.

[8] Šeman E.I.: Wspołczesne wyzwania w etyce medycznej – ginekologia. Med. Prakt. wyd. spec.: Wspołczesne wyzwania etyki medycznej, 2024; e203–e209.

[14] Auger N, Healy-Profitós J, Ayoub A, Lewin A, Low N, Induced abortion and implications for long-term mental health: a cohort study of 1.2 million pregnancies, Journal of Psychiatric Research, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires. 2025.05.031.

bottom of page