Perhaps you’ve already heard, perhaps you have not. Poland, my beloved country is giving me yet another reason to not go back living there. It’s been all in plain sight since the extreme right wing took over the reign but one can always hope the worst case scenario isn’t going to happen. A once democratic country resembles more of a dictatorship nowadays. Every single decision the government is pushing through seems to be targeted against the people instead for them.
However, among many of the government’s new rulings, there’s one that is currently raising blood pressure of at least half the country to the point, where it has become an international matter. The matter in question is a project of a complete abortion ban. Now, let me stop you before you say you’re ‘pro life’ and find arguments to fight my point of view. As much as I don’t think abortion should be used as a mean of birth control, I can’t agree with anything the new law might introduce. Its creators want to ban the abortion even in the case of rape, incest or a direct threat to a woman’s life. Yes, they would rather have raped kids giving birth to unwanted (and most likely despised) babies, women dying due to complications during the labor or mothers grieving for the newborns who will die immediately after the birth, because of various deformities that have occurred during pregnancy but couldn’t have been caught on time, since any kind of prenatal care would be banned as well! If the fetus has no brain matter, is missing bone structure or is showing any sign of malformation, as a mother you wouldn’t even have the right to be informed about it, because the government would punish any doctor trying to help you. God (if any exists) forbids you have a miscarriage – you would be questioned by the police and the DA office, and until you’ve proven you took no part in mishandling your pregnancy and didn’t cause the miscarriage yourself, you would go to jail for up to 5 years (meanwhile rapists get less). And so will any doctor, nurse, friend, neighbor, your cat or your milkman if they had any partaking in this ‘event’. Not that they helped you stick a hanger up in your vagina or take a bath in hot water. It would happen even if they were just holding your hand while you were bleeding out in your own bed, terrified to go to the hospital in fear for your own safety. I myself had a miscarriage and went through hell and back. I cannot even comprehend what was going through minds of politicians who ‘ayed’ this bill’s project, sitting in their warm parliament seats, completely detached from the ordinary people’s every day worries. But I know what goes through a mind of a woman, who’s about to lose her child. And the last place she belongs in is jail. It’s them, who should be tried and put in jail for imposing such inhumane laws on anyone.
Are you currently participating in the in vitro fertilization treatment? You better tell your hormones and uterus to hurry up, because quite soon this could also be illegal. I’d like to put it out there in a very simple way: those who want kids but for medical reasons can’t have them, still won’t have any and those who don’t want kids, will have plenty, cause soon enough any kind of birth control could be punished by law. The question it all raises is simple as well: is the government ready to provide for families vested by god almighty with 6 or more children? Are the politicians and clergy going to support families who lost their mothers due to labor complications or self inflicted mortal wounds occurred during a DYI abortion? Are they prepared to adopt all those unwanted children, especially the ones with disabilities? Are they ready to proudly live their lives, knowing that they deprived a 11 year old rape victim of any kind of decent future? If she ever lives through the labor that is. Are the priests prepared to face the deformed newborns, look their mothers in the eyes and christen the baby before it dies? Those same priests who, so very often, secretly have mistresses and kids? Those priests, who rape young boys and then preach from their pulpits about purity and decency? Why is the Polish government so desperately and sickly following whatever the church says, this I don’t know and I will never understand it or accept it. Although I have to mention the clergy was opposed to imprisoning women under those circumstances. But The Constitution guarantees the freedom of religion and no government should favor one religion over another.
In all that madness and sadness one thing is starting to clarify – our solidarity. All of a sudden a majority of the country rises from their beds and goes on the streets – mothers, husbands, brothers, mothers-in-law, you name it. And they fill those streets with thousands and they stand for what is righteously theirs – basic human rights. Today’s so called Black Protest is not an attempt to make an abortion available to anyone on a daily basis, like fresh danish at the bakery around the corner. It’s a fight for a right to decide about your own body and, when it comes to this terrible choice, being able to choose whether to terminate the pregnancy before it kills you or keep it and live with its consequences and prepare yourself for a life of hardship. Because caring and providing for a bedridden child, who’ll never walk/talk/see/eat or use a bathroom by himself requires an unhuman strength that only parents can understand. But it’s also un-human like to deprive us of the right to make that decision.
E.
P.S. There are voices saying the abortion ban project is only a smoke screen for a more complex and questionable issue involving new CETA and TTIP regulations in EU. Perhaps it’s true, in which case those actions should also be questioned and addressed. But even if that’s the reality, for once in so many years I see my countrymen uniting again, to fight for the right cause and there’s not a single thing that’s wrong about it. Having experienced centuries of wars, invasions, partitions and other horrors thrown in our faces, maybe we can stand our ground again and be one, yet again. Even if it turns out to be a lost cause, I love seeing my fellow Poles getting together and demanding their rights. I’m proud of people who did it.
What The Fibro?! 