BellaOnline Forums Travel and Culture Polish Culture Abortion In Poland

hEY gUYS.....LILY HERE!

Eric....good to see you back!

My take on abortion in Poland.....since I was just there a few months back for six weeks and did ask around. As I`ve mentioned before, I`m mother of ten children so abortion is an issue with me.

Poland still has largely pro-life laws dating back to the changes made in 1994 which criminalized all abortions except for rape and incest and life of the mother cases.



The present government is very left leaning and is pushing a measure to legalize abortion on demand. The Church and pro-life groups-HLI Europa in the lead, are fighting this proposal.HLI is Human Life International out of Washington DC and is world wide.



There is a great deal of apprehension concerning the negative influence that the European Union (EU) will have on Poland. Most recently the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva asked the government to legalize abortion. So pressure is also coming from the UN. At the EU the vast majority of the Polish representatives are pro-life and are helping to fight the abortion agenda in Brussels at the parliament.



HLI has a very strong office in Gdansk, Poland with four full time staff who work for life in Poland and Central and Eastern Europe.



Please do continue keeping this part of the world in your prayers as they do face a terrific anti-life onslaught.



Yours in Christ,

lily

Eric) woman having choice is one thing. Woman using abortion as birth control is bizzare. If woman have to use abortion as birth control, its telling something thats lacking in their society. In the year 2005 for a society to be using abortion as birth control strikes me as a society that does'nt respect woman. Most third world countries don't pratice birth control this way.

Abortion has always been a low-cost medical practice that is easy to obtain. In the USSR, the ideology was that women were free to choose what happens with their bodies, and that included abortion. As I said already, there was absolutely no social stigma whatsoever attached to abortions in the Soviet Union, whereas even many liberal Americans still feel a little upset over the subject.

Today in Russia, the low-cost abortions continue. Condoms are more available now than before, but people would rather not use them. Things continue as before - the woman has sex, then goes to the nearest clinic to end the pregnancy.

Most third-world countries practice no birth control whatsoever. In fact, the majority of third-world countries don't even offer the women the right to any sort of birth control.

Unfortunately in this religious Poland - abortions were popular especially in 60-es, even among so called religious women. But the church started fighting very much against it with good results. I do not know about any of my friends my age who had an abortion but I know about some women my mother's age who had abortions - just because they did not find anything bad about it. Some of them were even married women with some children.

I cannot agree that abortion is something... natural, especially if it is done on the fetus which is over 3 months old with fully shaped organs.

I believe that the lack of religion destroyed some good morality in Russia.

Eric) i certainly wouldn't consider abortion on demand being used for birth control as liberating for woman . i realize you didn't state that. However, for woman to have 5, 6 or even 7 or 8 abortions in their lifetime is not fair especially to woman. For a woman to have a surgically invasive procedure time after time to control there " reproductive freedom" is very sad. I realize Russian condoms maybe of Soviet era quality, but leaving abortion primarly as the major form of birth control is not only a unliberating act for woman, but i would even go so far as to say it is demeaning to woman of that particular society. A more understanding society should offer more options for their woman.

Lack of religion has distroyed morality...HA...religion has killed more people in the form of wars than abortion has "killed" fetuses. Deeply religious people are more judgemental and narrow-minded than any other group. I personally am anti-religion. Religion is man made. I am not going to go to church and be spoon fed someone elses idea on who God is and treasure it as if his/her opinion is gold. There are 100's of different religions all based on the same book and they all claim to be the "right" one.

But as far as a woman using abortion as a primary form of birth control...now that is sick. I went to H.S. with a girl who by the time we graduated had 3 abortions. I was completely disgusted with her lack of responsibility. If you don't want a kid use protection. Abortion should be there for a last alternative when that "oops" happens.

Giving a woman the right to chose what happens to her body and to decide whether or not to be someones mother for the rest of her life is liberating. Giving women what they want is liberating. Women are the ones who get pregnant, woman are the ones who walk into the clinics, obviously women (some not all) want abortions.

Making abortion illegal does not stop abortion. In the U.S. when abortion was illegal plenty of women still got them. Criminalizing abortion forces women to get them illegally and unsafely while the wealthy just go to another country to get it done.

there's a lot of hypocrisy by Catholics who are anti-abortion on religious grounds, in that so many of them use artificial contraception - which they should be equally opposed to on religious grounds....

and if you believe that abortion is wrong because it involves deliberately killing a human being then you should oppose it in all circumstances - no exceptions....

it's not true that abortion is unnatural. about 25% of conceptions spontaneously abort, usually before the woman has even noticed that she is pregnant....

nobody wants to have an abortion - and making it illegal doesn't stop it.

all that happens is that safe legal abortions are replaced by unsafe illegal abortions - the consequences of which are obvious - exploitation, suffering and risk to health and life of the woman seeking the abortion....

alternatively she can travel to a country where abortion is legal - provided she has the means to do so. abortion is illegal in Ireland - and as a result Irish women seeking abortion come to the UK instead....

only in America....

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=44779
Abortionist accused of eating fetuses

(not for the squeamish)....

Here is much tamer news story

http://www.wdaftv4.com/fullstory.asp?ID=9141