BuzzFeed: This Is What Happens To Women’s Rights When The Far-Right Takes Over

But when it came to something as sensitive as changing the abortion law, a democratic imprimatur was important. So conservative groups joined forces, consulted with PiS, and brought the ban to legislators as a “citizens’ initiative” — not the pet project of one parliamentarian but an idea backed by nearly half a million signatures, most of them collected after Sunday mass. [...]

Veteran protesters hoped they might draw a couple thousand people out on the streets of Warsaw over the course of the day. Government officials scoffed at the idea before it even began. “Let them play,” Poland’s foreign minister said.

Play they did. An estimated 30,000 women flooded the streets of the capital, forcing buses and cars into U-turns. “The whole day, Warsaw was blocked,” remembered Krystyna Kacpura, director of the Federation for Women and Family Planning, a non-governmental organization in Warsaw. [...]

The new law takes a soft touch to the most heated part of Poland’s abortion debate: whether women should be allowed to abort “imperfect” pregnancies. Abortion opponents call this part of the law the “eugenic exception,” which elicits memories of Poland’s painful past: Eugenics was a pseudoscience, developed in the United States and Great Britain, that supposed a racial hierarchy among the world’s populations. It helped underpin the Nazi belief in “Aryan” superiority, a belief that led to a mass sterilization campaign in the early days of Nazism and, eventually, to the murder of “inferior peoples,” especially Jews, in the Nazi death camps of eastern Poland. [...]

Ordo Iuris, the Catholic think tank that drafted the ban, pushes “pro-life” logic a step further — by borrowing liberal human rights rhetoric and repurposing it for a fight against abortion. For Ordo Iuris, banning abortion isn’t just about protecting life; it’s about “the principle of equality before the law.” If society doesn’t tolerate discrimination against people because of age or disability, the group argues, why should society let pregnant mothers “discriminate” against their own fetuses? From this perspective, an abortion ban is actually the logical conclusion of a liberal values system. As Ordo Iuris’s website puts it, banning abortion is really just eliminating “legal discrimination against people in their prenatal period of development.”

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