Poland court ruling bans eugenic abortions
Once again in its history, Poland is posed as a bulwark of Christian civilisation in the face of barbarism. Last Thursday, the Polish Constitutional Court invalidated the paragraph of the Polish law of 1993 on abortion which until now allowed abortion when prenatal examinations or other medical data indicate a "high probability of severe and irreversible disability of the foetus or incurable life-threatening disease."
In the ruling, the tribunal’s president, Julia Przylebska, said that allowing abortions in cases of foetal abnormality legalised “eugenic practices with regard to an unborn child, thus denying it the respect and protection of human dignity.”
Because the Polish Constitution guarantees a right to life, terminating a pregnancy based on the health of the foetus amounted to “a directly forbidden form of discrimination,” she added.
Before the decision, which cannot be appealed, Poland permitted terminations only for foetal abnormalities, a threat to a woman’s health or in the case of incest or rape. But in practice, the overwhelming majority of legal abortions — 1,074 of 1,100 performed last year — resulted from foetal abnormalities.
From these numbers, it can be seen that more than a third of children affected by Down Syndrome — could be legally aborted, a procedure that was even desirable in the eyes of some doctors.
In 2017, a citizens’ bill calling for the ban on eugenic abortions gathered 830,000 signatures, which was an all-time record for a citizens’ initiative, in this country of 38.5 million inhabitants.
Source: visegradpost.com
