(LifeSiteNews) — The first abortion center in decades opened in Warsaw, Poland on Saturday, aimed at helping women obtain chemical abortions amid the nation’s strict laws against the fatal procedure.
“We want this place to be in TripAdvisor, telling people you have to see this place in Warsaw,” said Natalia Broniarczyk, who belongs to the center’s founding group, Abortion Dream Team. “Because this is the first abortion center in democratic Poland.”
The center will help women learn how to obtain abortion pills as well as provide a space where women can “receive support while they take the pill,” The Guardian reported. While taking abortion pills is not illegal in Poland, providing them, or helping someone to obtain them, can be punished with up to three years’ prison time.
Poland currently enforces an almost total ban on abortion, with exceptions in place only for the life or health of the mother, or for instances in which a woman becomes pregnant due to a criminal act. In cases of illegal abortions, only the medical staff carrying out abortions, and not the women having them, are subject to prosecution in the country.
It remains to be seen how the justice system will respond. “What we’re doing could be recognized as illegal,” acknowledged Justyna Wydrzyńska, part of Abortion Dream Team, who went on to argue that providing abortions, which kill innocent preborn babies, is needed to “help people.”
After decades of tight restrictions on abortion in Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk has expressed his intention to legalize abortion. While he has said the legislature does not currently have the numbers it needs to support such a measure, his party has declared it will renew efforts to legalize abortion after the May presidential elections.
“I can only promise that within the framework of the existing law we will do everything to make women suffer less, to make abortion as safe as possible and accessible when a woman has to make such a decision. So that people who get involved in helping a woman are not prosecuted,” Tusk said.
The Abortion Dream Team pinned their hopes on these words, announcing their plans for their abortion center soon afterward.
Every abortion is gravely immoral, as affirmed by the Catholic Church, since human life begins from conception.
While abortion pills are becoming increasingly popular, they are not only deadly to preborn babies but induce abortions that are dangerous to and traumatic for mothers. In the U.S. alone, a 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted the “abortion pill has resulted in over 4,000 reported adverse events since 2000, including 24 maternal deaths.”
A UK investigation has shown that 1 in 17 women who used pills-by-post abortion services in 2020 suffered from side effects so severe that they required hospital treatment.
