"Praise Be" for abortion protests in Poland

This week’s topic: Feminism

“Praise be” for abortion protests in Poland

Source: Terry Reintke (@TerryReintke) / Twitter

In this week’s blog post for the series on theories and concepts in International Relations, ‘Feminism’ will be incorporated into discussion. I found this topic and particularly the whole of feminism and IR extremely influential, to see the clear divisions in which remain between men and women. As a female myself, it is useful to study feminist approaches to IR to understand the genealogy behind the structure of a patriarchal society and to see the progress feminists have made.

Feminism has been extremely relevant within Poland during 2020, where huge protests arose as a result of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruling, which stated permitting abortion on grounds of “a severe an irreversible foetal defect or incurable illness that threatens the foetus’s life” was unconstitutional. Feminists, internationally, saw the ruling as a clear subordination and marginalisation of women and their rights- this further tightened the already harsh abortion rules within Poland, where only 1,000 legal abortions took place in 2019.

Source: www.foreignpolicy.com

Terminations, with the ruling, will only be allowed in cases of rape or incest, or if the mother's health is at risk, meaning an almost most total ban. This therefore corresponds with post-modern feminists’ beliefs that politics is gendered and power is not 'balanced' equally , power has the sole purpose of :establishing and maintaining the control of man over man' (Sylvester, 1994)- gender has allowed the politics of knowledge regarding abortion in Poland to remain highly unequal as the tribunal hearing fails to see women’s rights over her body and future.

Such ruling also enhanced the belief of standpoint feminists, that the ruling needed to be redefined with 'the standpoint of people who have been systematically excluded from power', women (Keohane, 1989), to promote the emancipation of women instead of the destruction of their rights. As a result of the ruling, feminists and women protested in the hundreds and thousands across the country, a protest in Warsaw at the end of October attracted about 100,000 people. Such protests thus allowed the deconstruction, of the ruling - the government backed down and the rule did not come into place, as it was not published.

Source:www.skynews.com

Yet despite such progress, doctors are still reluctant to perform such procedure, due to the legal uncertainty. Furthermore, Women's rights groups estimate that 80,000 and 120,000 Polish women a year travel abroad to obtain an abortion, all due to the defence of the 1993 law was based on UN rules outlawing torture. Feminists thus would argue that the view and stigma of abortion has to be re-written, in the name of women, to tell the "one true story" (Keohane, 1989).