In February 2020, a desperate woman made a phone call to the activist group Abortion Without Borders.
Ania (not her real name) was 12 weeks’ pregnant with twins and trapped in a relationship with a violent partner. She was also suffering from hyperemesis, an acute pregnancy sickness that left her vomiting multiple times a day, unable to keep down food. She wanted to end her pregnancy, but every avenue was blocked under Poland’s strict abortion laws.
By the time she called Abortion Without Borders – while hiding in bushes near her apartment – she was distraught. She told activists she would rather die than continue the pregnancy.
Justyna Wydrzyńska made a quick decision when she heard about Ania’s call. She gathered her own abortion pills and posted them to her. For this act, she became the first activist in Poland to be found guilty of aiding an abortion in a landmark case over women’s rights. Wydrzyńska was sentenced to 30 hours of community service a month for eight months.
But she has no regrets. “I will do the same [again],” she told the Guardian during a recent visit to Brussels. From the moment she heard about Ania’s plight, she said she knew “1,000% that I have to do it”.
The story stirred painful memories for Wydrzyńska. She said: “I was also around the 12th week when I stopped my own pregnancy. She was a victim of a violent partner. I had been living with a violent partner. So when I heard this story, and it was very similar to my own one, this is why I sent the pills.”
In early 2020, borders were closing across Europe amid growing alarm over Covid-19. With the added uncertainty about what the restrictions meant for women seeking to buy abortion pills abroad, posting them seemed the safest option.
Ania’s partner discovered the pills – which are endorsed by the World Health Organisation as a very safe way of ending an unwanted pregnancy during the first trimester – and called the police. Ania never took the tablets.
Along with Malta, Poland has some of the strictest abortion laws in Europe, allowing for termination only in cases of rape, incest or a threat to the mother’s health or life.
The restrictions were tightened further in October 2020, when Poland’s constitutional tribunal ruled that abortions on the grounds of foetal defects were unconstitutional, ending the most common legal route for terminating a pregnancy. The tribunal has been described as “illegitimate” by the European parliament, following the appointment of numerous judges seen as governing party loyalists.
Activists say the interpretation of the law can be even stricter than the letter, as doctors wait for a foetal heart to stop beating before they intervene to save a woman’s life. In January 2022, a woman identified as Agnieszka T died of suspected septic shock in the first trimester of a twin pregnancy. After one twin’s heart stopped beating, doctors refused to remove the baby, citing abortion legislation. The other twin’s heartbeat stopped a week later, but doctors waited a further two days to end the pregnancy.
Despite her severe sickness and acute anxiety, Ania had no hope of getting an abortion on medical grounds. So when police seized her abortion pills, she took a desperate gamble. She bought a catheter and inserted it into her cervix to end the pregnancy herself. She wore the device for days, reinserting it when it fell out. The whole time, she was “paralysed with fear that someone will find out”, she said in a recent interview where she described her ordeal in harrowing detail.
“In those days I became convinced how untrue it is to say that human dignity is inherent and inalienable,” she told she told Polish website Oko.press. After several days of this self-administered procedure, she was shaking and her whole body ached. Yet she feared if she went to hospital they might save the pregnancy. Two days later, she was in the emergency room with life-threatening sepsis. Her pregnancy was brought to an end and she survived.
For Wydrzyńska, it is painful to describe what happened to Ania. “Ania had the chance for a safe abortion, but the chance was taken away from her. As a consequence, Ania had to use this method of our grandmothers and great- grandmothers,” she told a European parliament hearing last month, her voice shaking with emotion.
Wydrzyńska came to Brussels to call on EU authorities to “put the pressure on the Polish government” to stop criminalising people who aid abortions. She is also seeking more financial support for Abortion Without Borders, which helped 34,000 women in Poland access a termination in the 12 months following the constitutional tribunal’s ruling. Yet this is believed to be only a fraction of women in the country seeking abortions.
Meanwhile, Wydrzyńska fears her case will have a chilling effect on other activists trying to help women and doctors will “use this as an excuse” to avoid legal abortions.
For now, her sentence is suspended as she awaits the outcome of her appeal. She does not have high hopes of acquittal. Nor is she hopeful of reform of Poland’s abortion laws, ahead of upcoming autumn elections that threaten the grip on power of the ruling nationalist party, Law and Justice.
Robert Biedroń, a Polish centre-left MEP who chairs the European parliament’s women’s rights and gender equality committee, points out that Poland’s strict abortion laws long predate the return to power of Law and Justice in 2015. He said: “This situation for women not accessing sexual and reproductive services has not been created only by the Law and Justice ruling party. It is a long-term story that was continued in a radicalised version by this government.”
But, beyond this year’s elections, Wydrzyńska is optimistic about the long-term outlook. “I know that the society is more progressive than politics. So, sooner or later, it will change.”
