Just before Easter, an unborn 9-month-old baby boy was killed in Oleśnica in southwestern Poland by an injection of potassium chloride into his heart. He was due to be born any day, and he was protected by Polish law. The baby, named Felek by journalists, was aborted under illegal new guidelines released by the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The child was suspected of having a bone disease. The mother was offered alternatives, including delivering the child via cesarean section under full anesthesia.
“This child would have been born alive and capable of life,” Deputy Health Minister Urszula Demkow admitted on Polsat Television. “And so, according to Polish law, neonatologists would immediately proceed to save this child. So the only way to ensure it was not born alive was to administer a potassium chloride injection into the heart while the child was still in the womb … This is extremely difficult for me as a human, as a doctor, as a mother, and as a minister. Perhaps the mother could have chosen to give birth and put the child up for adoption.”
When asked if such abortion should be permitted in Poland, Demkow replied: “I don’t know. This is one of those moral questions that has no good answer.”
Donald Tusk’s illegal war on his nation’s pro-life laws is perhaps the most egregious example of the progressive approach to democracy and the rule of law. Democracy, to progressives like Tusk, is merely a means to an end, and bringing legal abortion to Poland is a fundamental aspect of his agenda. Olivier Bault, a journalist and communications director for Ordos Iuris Institute, a Polish think tank, has been tracking Tusk’s relentless assault on democratic norms.
“Tusk said last September that he is using the tools of ‘militant democracy’ and that he may sometimes act in ways that are not in accordance with the law,” Bault told me. “In fact, he and his government have taken many actions that violate both the law and the Constitution. This has led to accusations of a rampant coup, notably by the President of the Constitutional Tribunal, whose rulings the Tusk government neither publishes nor considers binding.”
Tusk campaigned on a promise to legalize abortion, assuring his supporters that his government would liberalize abortion laws within 100 days of being elected. Since taking office on December 13, 2023, he has repeatedly failed to do so—at least legally. After the Sejm, the lower house of Poland’s Parliament, rejected his proposed bill legalizing abortion on demand up until 12 weeks last July, Tusk turned to other tactics to get the job done.
“In September, Health Minister Izabela Leszczyna issued instructions to doctors in the form of guidelines, simultaneously threatening heavy financial penalties for doctors and hospitals that refuse to comply,” Bault said. “These guidelines have no legal status and therefore cannot impose an obligation on doctors to follow them. On the contrary, doctors who do not follow them risk civil, criminal, and disciplinary liability.”
“Meanwhile, Justice Minister Adam Bodnar, who unlawfully took control of the prosecution services by replacing the national prosecutor in January 2024 without the necessary approval of President Duda, issued guidelines in August 2024 instructing prosecutors not to prosecute illegal abortions and to prosecute doctors who refuse abortion requests from women.”
In short, Bault explained, having failed to pass new laws, Tusk has simply decided to ignore the current laws—and create penalties for those who seek to follow them.
Tusk stated as much. “We are looking for such ways of acting, in accordance with the law, that will allow access to legal abortion for women who, for various reasons, should have the right to this abortion,” he said after his bill failed. Health Minister Izabela Leszczyna concurred, stating: “A pregnant woman turning to a medical entity that has a contract with the National Health Fund with a medical referral that the pregnancy is a threat to her health, must receive the medical service of abortion in this entity.”
Under Tusk’s regime, hospitals that refuse to perform an abortion on a woman with a medical referral could be fined up to 500,000 zlotys (around $129,300) or lose their National Health Fund contracts. Instead of doctors being discouraged from committing abortions, the Tusk government is demanding that they perform them essentially on demand. The NGO Abortion Dream Team promptly took him at his word, setting up an illegal abortion center on Warsaw’s Wiejksa Street just opposite parliament near the headquarters of Tusk’s Civic Coalition.
Providing abortion pills is technically punishable by up to three years in prison in Poland, but the Abortion Dream Team is confident that Tusk will tolerate their presence. “Group abortions will take place here,” one of the founders, Justyna Wydrzynska told journalists in March. “There is no other way to get rid of the stigma, the shame.” The Abortion Dream Team claims to assist 44,000 abortions every year; Wydrzynska is currently facing a retrial after her conviction for aiding and abetting an abortion last year.
“Abortion is only permitted in Poland if a pregnancy was caused by rape or if a woman’s pregnancy threatens her physical health or life,” Bault said. “To be precise, the 1993 law that banned abortion ‘on demand’ mentions only a threat to a woman’s health, without specifying whether it must be her physical or mental health. However, up until now, the law has been interpreted as referring to serious threats to her physical health, which is in line with the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Tribunal and the Supreme Court since 1997.”
“The Tusk government has now issued guidelines on abortion that are both unconstitutional and unlawful,” he emphasized. “These guidelines stipulate that a woman presenting a diagnosis of a threat to her mental health due to pregnancy should be allowed to abort, and that doctors have no right to question such a diagnosis. This also contradicts both the Medical Code of Ethics and the Law on the Medical Profession.”
Indeed, despite the much-publicized protests that rocked major Polish cities after the Constitutional Court’s October 2020 ruling forbidding abortions in cases of prenatal diagnoses such as Down syndrome, abortions dropped by 90% and Agent France-Presse reported in 2020 that “the silent majority of Poles favor [the] strict abortion law.” In fact, Poland is a rare example of a country where pro-life sentiment has grown rather than waned over the past three decades. A Kantar poll indicated that a mere 22% of Poles favor abortion on demand, while 62% believe it should only be legal in certain cases.
“Based on surveys published by conservative media, roughly two-thirds of Poles are against legalizing abortion in cases where the mother ‘just doesn’t want the child,’” Bault told me. In 1992, a full 47% of Poles believed that abortion should be legal for financial reasons—by 2016, only 14% of Poles still felt that way. “What is interesting is that while support for abortion increased in most surveys after the 2020 ban on eugenic abortion by the Constitutional Tribunal, it has been decreasing in most surveys under Donald Tusk’s government. In any case, opposition to legal abortion is significantly higher in Poland than in most European countries.”
Abortion activists realize that Tusk’s fragile coalition government provides a window of opportunity to force their agenda on the country, democracy be damned. Karol Nawrocki’s victory in the Polish presidential race on June 1st was viewed as a “devastating blow” to abortion rights. “There is no chance to change the abortion laws in Poland,” said Polish Member of the European Parliament Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus. Nika Kovač, coordinator for the My Voice, My Choice campaign, stated that the election of a pro-life president “effectively paralyzed” Tusk’s efforts. Nawrocki has stated that he will refuse to sign any bill legalizing abortion.
In the meantime, Poland’s pro-life movement is fighting the forces of “militant democracy” to defend the rule of law and the right to life. “We continue to make these developments public, and we keep organizing marches for life, which have drawn record numbers of participants since Donald Tusk returned to power,” said Bault. “The Catholic Church also plays a significant role in defending the right to life from conception to natural death in Poland. Current trends are on our side. The radicalism of the left-liberal coalition led by Donald Tusk is awakening more and more Polish men and women to the reality that the most fundamental of all rights—the right to life—is now under threat, along with many other civil rights and freedoms under Donald Tusk.”
“We have also been pressuring President Duda and opposition MPs to seize the Constitutional Tribunal on the Health Ministry’s guidelines on abortion, so as to give it a chance to clearly define the kind of threats to a woman’s health that can allow her to abort her baby, and given the Polish constitutional court’s long-standing record of defending the right to life since conception, that will likely not include mental issues,” Bault stated. “Our lawyers continue to act in court to prosecute doctors and intermediaries involved in abortions.”
With the election of Karol Nawrocki to the presidency, Tusk’s government faces the reality that they will “not be able to pass laws to retroactively legalize their unlawful actions,” Bault noted. “However, with the government exerting increasing control over both the prosecution service and the courts, there is little we can do as long as Poland remains a self-proclaimed regime of ‘militant democracy’—with the political and financial support of Brussels, unfortunately.”
In 2021, progressive writer Anne Applebaum devoted much of her book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism to condemning Poland’s Law and Justice government. Now, as Tusk’s government tramples democratic norms, disregards the courts, subverts the rule of law, and engages in full-scale purges of ideological opponents, Applebaum and her ilk have remained silent. Applebaum’s husband, incidentally, serves as Tusk’s foreign minister. As it turns out, it is acceptable to abort norms in service of progressive causes like feticide. When progressives are faced with a choice between abortion or democracy, they choose abortion every time.
Donald Tusk’s Illegal War on Poland’s Pro-Life Laws
one_life from Pixabay
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Just before Easter, an unborn 9-month-old baby boy was killed in Oleśnica in southwestern Poland by an injection of potassium chloride into his heart. He was due to be born any day, and he was protected by Polish law. The baby, named Felek by journalists, was aborted under illegal new guidelines released by the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The child was suspected of having a bone disease. The mother was offered alternatives, including delivering the child via cesarean section under full anesthesia.
“This child would have been born alive and capable of life,” Deputy Health Minister Urszula Demkow admitted on Polsat Television. “And so, according to Polish law, neonatologists would immediately proceed to save this child. So the only way to ensure it was not born alive was to administer a potassium chloride injection into the heart while the child was still in the womb … This is extremely difficult for me as a human, as a doctor, as a mother, and as a minister. Perhaps the mother could have chosen to give birth and put the child up for adoption.”
When asked if such abortion should be permitted in Poland, Demkow replied: “I don’t know. This is one of those moral questions that has no good answer.”
Donald Tusk’s illegal war on his nation’s pro-life laws is perhaps the most egregious example of the progressive approach to democracy and the rule of law. Democracy, to progressives like Tusk, is merely a means to an end, and bringing legal abortion to Poland is a fundamental aspect of his agenda. Olivier Bault, a journalist and communications director for Ordos Iuris Institute, a Polish think tank, has been tracking Tusk’s relentless assault on democratic norms.
“Tusk said last September that he is using the tools of ‘militant democracy’ and that he may sometimes act in ways that are not in accordance with the law,” Bault told me. “In fact, he and his government have taken many actions that violate both the law and the Constitution. This has led to accusations of a rampant coup, notably by the President of the Constitutional Tribunal, whose rulings the Tusk government neither publishes nor considers binding.”
Tusk campaigned on a promise to legalize abortion, assuring his supporters that his government would liberalize abortion laws within 100 days of being elected. Since taking office on December 13, 2023, he has repeatedly failed to do so—at least legally. After the Sejm, the lower house of Poland’s Parliament, rejected his proposed bill legalizing abortion on demand up until 12 weeks last July, Tusk turned to other tactics to get the job done.
“In September, Health Minister Izabela Leszczyna issued instructions to doctors in the form of guidelines, simultaneously threatening heavy financial penalties for doctors and hospitals that refuse to comply,” Bault said. “These guidelines have no legal status and therefore cannot impose an obligation on doctors to follow them. On the contrary, doctors who do not follow them risk civil, criminal, and disciplinary liability.”
“Meanwhile, Justice Minister Adam Bodnar, who unlawfully took control of the prosecution services by replacing the national prosecutor in January 2024 without the necessary approval of President Duda, issued guidelines in August 2024 instructing prosecutors not to prosecute illegal abortions and to prosecute doctors who refuse abortion requests from women.”
In short, Bault explained, having failed to pass new laws, Tusk has simply decided to ignore the current laws—and create penalties for those who seek to follow them.
Tusk stated as much. “We are looking for such ways of acting, in accordance with the law, that will allow access to legal abortion for women who, for various reasons, should have the right to this abortion,” he said after his bill failed. Health Minister Izabela Leszczyna concurred, stating: “A pregnant woman turning to a medical entity that has a contract with the National Health Fund with a medical referral that the pregnancy is a threat to her health, must receive the medical service of abortion in this entity.”
Under Tusk’s regime, hospitals that refuse to perform an abortion on a woman with a medical referral could be fined up to 500,000 zlotys (around $129,300) or lose their National Health Fund contracts. Instead of doctors being discouraged from committing abortions, the Tusk government is demanding that they perform them essentially on demand. The NGO Abortion Dream Team promptly took him at his word, setting up an illegal abortion center on Warsaw’s Wiejksa Street just opposite parliament near the headquarters of Tusk’s Civic Coalition.
Providing abortion pills is technically punishable by up to three years in prison in Poland, but the Abortion Dream Team is confident that Tusk will tolerate their presence. “Group abortions will take place here,” one of the founders, Justyna Wydrzynska told journalists in March. “There is no other way to get rid of the stigma, the shame.” The Abortion Dream Team claims to assist 44,000 abortions every year; Wydrzynska is currently facing a retrial after her conviction for aiding and abetting an abortion last year.
“Abortion is only permitted in Poland if a pregnancy was caused by rape or if a woman’s pregnancy threatens her physical health or life,” Bault said. “To be precise, the 1993 law that banned abortion ‘on demand’ mentions only a threat to a woman’s health, without specifying whether it must be her physical or mental health. However, up until now, the law has been interpreted as referring to serious threats to her physical health, which is in line with the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Tribunal and the Supreme Court since 1997.”
“The Tusk government has now issued guidelines on abortion that are both unconstitutional and unlawful,” he emphasized. “These guidelines stipulate that a woman presenting a diagnosis of a threat to her mental health due to pregnancy should be allowed to abort, and that doctors have no right to question such a diagnosis. This also contradicts both the Medical Code of Ethics and the Law on the Medical Profession.”
Indeed, despite the much-publicized protests that rocked major Polish cities after the Constitutional Court’s October 2020 ruling forbidding abortions in cases of prenatal diagnoses such as Down syndrome, abortions dropped by 90% and Agent France-Presse reported in 2020 that “the silent majority of Poles favor [the] strict abortion law.” In fact, Poland is a rare example of a country where pro-life sentiment has grown rather than waned over the past three decades. A Kantar poll indicated that a mere 22% of Poles favor abortion on demand, while 62% believe it should only be legal in certain cases.
“Based on surveys published by conservative media, roughly two-thirds of Poles are against legalizing abortion in cases where the mother ‘just doesn’t want the child,’” Bault told me. In 1992, a full 47% of Poles believed that abortion should be legal for financial reasons—by 2016, only 14% of Poles still felt that way. “What is interesting is that while support for abortion increased in most surveys after the 2020 ban on eugenic abortion by the Constitutional Tribunal, it has been decreasing in most surveys under Donald Tusk’s government. In any case, opposition to legal abortion is significantly higher in Poland than in most European countries.”
Abortion activists realize that Tusk’s fragile coalition government provides a window of opportunity to force their agenda on the country, democracy be damned. Karol Nawrocki’s victory in the Polish presidential race on June 1st was viewed as a “devastating blow” to abortion rights. “There is no chance to change the abortion laws in Poland,” said Polish Member of the European Parliament Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus. Nika Kovač, coordinator for the My Voice, My Choice campaign, stated that the election of a pro-life president “effectively paralyzed” Tusk’s efforts. Nawrocki has stated that he will refuse to sign any bill legalizing abortion.
In the meantime, Poland’s pro-life movement is fighting the forces of “militant democracy” to defend the rule of law and the right to life. “We continue to make these developments public, and we keep organizing marches for life, which have drawn record numbers of participants since Donald Tusk returned to power,” said Bault. “The Catholic Church also plays a significant role in defending the right to life from conception to natural death in Poland. Current trends are on our side. The radicalism of the left-liberal coalition led by Donald Tusk is awakening more and more Polish men and women to the reality that the most fundamental of all rights—the right to life—is now under threat, along with many other civil rights and freedoms under Donald Tusk.”
“We have also been pressuring President Duda and opposition MPs to seize the Constitutional Tribunal on the Health Ministry’s guidelines on abortion, so as to give it a chance to clearly define the kind of threats to a woman’s health that can allow her to abort her baby, and given the Polish constitutional court’s long-standing record of defending the right to life since conception, that will likely not include mental issues,” Bault stated. “Our lawyers continue to act in court to prosecute doctors and intermediaries involved in abortions.”
With the election of Karol Nawrocki to the presidency, Tusk’s government faces the reality that they will “not be able to pass laws to retroactively legalize their unlawful actions,” Bault noted. “However, with the government exerting increasing control over both the prosecution service and the courts, there is little we can do as long as Poland remains a self-proclaimed regime of ‘militant democracy’—with the political and financial support of Brussels, unfortunately.”
In 2021, progressive writer Anne Applebaum devoted much of her book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism to condemning Poland’s Law and Justice government. Now, as Tusk’s government tramples democratic norms, disregards the courts, subverts the rule of law, and engages in full-scale purges of ideological opponents, Applebaum and her ilk have remained silent. Applebaum’s husband, incidentally, serves as Tusk’s foreign minister. As it turns out, it is acceptable to abort norms in service of progressive causes like feticide. When progressives are faced with a choice between abortion or democracy, they choose abortion every time.
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