The moment Justyna Wydrzynska put the pills in the envelope and gave her phone number, her mind flashed: “This could go very wrong.” But the need was great. The woman who panicked to Aborcja bez Granic (Abortion Without Borders) was almost twelve weeks pregnant. A Polish woman who, like herself years earlier, did not want another child from an abusive husband. “I heard her story and thought: I must help her,” says abortion activist Wydrzynska (47) in her sunny office in Warsaw.
That is why in February 2020 she sent the miscarriage-inducing medication with which the woman could solve one of her problems. A year and a half later, the police raided Wydrzynska, turned her house inside out and subjected her to questioning. This Thursday she will stand trial – as the first Polish abortion activist – for “assistance with abortion” and “having drugs without a license to market them”. She could face up to three years in prison. “I’m counting on a year in jail,” she says.
Wydrzynska knows full well that she has broken the law. She has been helping women with unwanted pregnancies since her own abortion in 2006. She guides them on how to get mifepristone and misoprostol online and how to use those pills safely to terminate their pregnancy. Or, when the term within which medication can be taken has expired, where they can go abroad for an abortion. “Under Polish law, we are only allowed to give information.” Taking someone to the airport for an abortion in the Netherlands, helping to pay for the procedure or providing pills is punishable by law. That applies to activists, doctors and friends and family of someone who wants to terminate a pregnancy. A woman who induces or undergoes an abortion is not committing a crime herself.
Two women died
Poland has the most restrictive abortion law in the European Union after Malta. The procedure is only legal if the mother is in mortal danger or reports rape. In 2020, the conservative-nationalist ruling party PiS allowed the politically hijacked Constitutional Court to tighten up the already strict law even further. The court ruled that aborting a child with a birth defect – even if it would be fatal in any case – is unconstitutional.
The undemocratic tightening of the 1993 law has had two major consequences for women in Poland. At least two mothers have since died in hospital because doctors refused to remove their non-viable child and they went into shock themselves. Doctors would fear prosecution if they saved the woman’s life instead of the unborn child†
Polish abortion debate is on edge again after the death of a pregnant woman
Fear is precisely the intention, Wydrzynska thinks. Because the other effect of the ban was weeks of mass protests led by activists. As a result, almost every woman, even in the smallest village in Poland, now knows that she can turn to organizations such as Abortion Without Borders, to which Wydrzynska is affiliated. “The lawsuit against me is harassment of all other women, and men, who help in legal and less legal ways: don’t you dare.”
She hoped the 2021 raid would be intimidating enough for the state. They searched her house for more pills and took her laptop and several phones looking for evidence that she had sent them more than once. “It was the first and the last time,” she sighs. But now she faces a judge who has been appointed since PiS also made the appointment of lower judges political. “You know you’re in danger in this job, in this country,” Wydrzynska says. “I used to joke that I was ready to go to jail for this fight. But now that it’s actually about to happen, I know I was lying to myself. The stress is enormous.”
Polish Patriarchy
Wydrzynska was arrested for not wanting to surprise the woman who said she was being abused by her husband at home with the envelope of pills. She therefore used the Polish shipping system where you can leave mail in a locker and it is then left in a similar cupboard near the recipient. A code sent by SMS is required to open the lockers. And before that, Wydrzynska gave her own phone number. She’s not so good at being an activist that she has an anonymous SIM card. The transmission was discovered by the husband and he called the police, who were waiting for his wife when she returned home with the pills.
The woman who tried to help Wydrzynska has so far remained anonymous. The activist does not know how she is doing. “I never spoke to her directly. She has let our organization know that she hates what is happening. And that she had a miscarriage due to the stress of the police interrogation.” The abortion with the pills Wydrzynska sent never took place, but that does not exonerate her. Even if the woman had reported rape against her husband, only a gynaecologist would have been allowed to help her.
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It is unknown whether the woman has since been able to escape the situation of domestic violence. It took Wydrzynska three years after her abortion in 2006 to divorce the father of her three children. “This case is about more than access to abortion. It’s about how women are treated in Poland,” she says. “Why aren’t the police interested in how the man reported his wife, and whether he mistreated her? Why did she feel so unhappy and unsafe that abortion seemed the only way out? This is indicative of how the patriarchy in Poland rules.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of 14 July 2022