The CEDAW report stated that Poland’s laws limiting abortion constitute “gender-based violence against women” and “may amount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”, as defined by the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
The report stated further that Poland should “recognize the right to abortion as a fundamental right” and “take the necessary legal amendments towards total decriminalization and legalization of abortion”.
Poland banned almost all abortion in 2020 following a Supreme Court decision ruling that abortion in cases of disability and fetal anomaly is unconstitutional. Abortions in Poland consequently fell from 1,076 in 2020 to 107 in 2021.
Poland has a predominantly Catholic and pro-life population. In 2013, a poll found that 75% of Poles believed that abortion is “always wrong and can never be justified”. Only 7% said that abortion “could always be justified”.
International pro-life nations such as Poland for taking a stand in 2020. John Smeaton, SPUC’s CEO at the time, said: “It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of this judgment in the global struggle to defend human life from conception and our pro-abortion enemies in powerful international institutions understand that fact only too well.”
SPUC Comment
A SPUC spokesperson said: “The CEDAW has been captured by pro-abortion extremists seeking to force total decriminalisation of abortion on nations that refuse to comply with their nasty, life-denying ideology.
“The notion that pro-life laws constitute ‘violence’ against women, when (by definition) it is abortion that is violent and often directed at girls, is an absurd twisting of reality that must be called out. The CEDAW’s care for disability evidently doesn’t extend to the hundreds, if not thousands, of disabled babies saved already in Poland.
“This obscene report is part of the inevitable institutional pushback against pro-life nations that stand for life and the most vulnerable people in society. The UN has ultimately shamed itself.”
