Women plan street demonstrations in more than 20 Polish cities and towns on Thursday (October 22, 2026) to protest the lack of access to free and legal abortion.
Activists accuse Polish government of disinformation
Instead, measures were introduced to prevent hospitals from refusing to perform legal abortions on religious grounds. The measures are likely to be vetoed by the conservative president, Karol Nawrocki. “Women getting pregnant hear the prime minister say that everything is ok, that there is access to abortion, and then they end up in the hospital and see that is not the case. So they come to us when it’s very late and very complicated and expensive to help them.”
They’re accusing Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s liberal government of failing to fulfil its promise to relax Poland’s strict abortion laws, and are protesting even though the Parliament passed two bills on Tuesday (October 20) aimed at easing abortion rules. Rather than being liberalised, Poland’s abortion laws were tightened further, banning abortions of fetuses with congenital defects in 2020 under the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government. PM Tusk’s pro-European coalition won the 2023 election in part on a promise to liberalise Poland’s abortion laws. But in 2024, Mr. Tusk said in 2024 when he announced the measures.
Because it needs women’s support to win elections next year, she said the liberal government knew the draft laws stood no chance of withstanding Nawrocki’s veto, and has merely tried to create the impression of taking action.
Passing the draft laws now, a year before the next parliamentary election, is a case of “token gestures” rather than a genuine effort to reform abortion law, said Zofia Marcinek of the Abortion Dream Team, a reproductive rights activist group in Warsaw. Tusk said his government wouldn’t be able to overcome the likely veto of a conservative president. “The state will increasingly effectively stand on the side of the woman when she is making dramatic decisions in her life,” Mr. “The government’s promises act as a type of disinformation,” Ms. Marcinek told the AP .
