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I WOULD LIKE TO START THIS ARTICLE with a memory. I remember a cold, rainy day in 1989, as gray as only a November in Poland can be. I was sitting with one of my school friends at the bus stop, and she was telling me about having an abortion. She spoke about it openly and I wasn't surprised or shocked because I knew that those things happened sometimes. Many of our friends had already gone through it. This was a friend, not a girlfriend, but still I related to her situation. She was about to graduate and didn't want to have an unplanned pregnancy, for which she could be expelled from school.
This memory comes to mind because, just four years later, the Polish parliament decided to limit access to legal abortion. How could Polish society, the same society where abortions were legal for decades, accept that change? My answer lies in this quite controversial thesis: nothing actually changed for citizens, so in turn, nobody today wants to work for change on the abortion issue.
MYTHS ABOUT NUMBERS
The available data on abortion in Poland is extremely unreliable. The figures range from the official statistics, which claim around 600 legal procedures per year, up to 200,000 abortions yearly, including clandestine procedures, which is the figure presented by NGOs. What is the reality? Let's look at the data on abortion from the Communist period: in the mid- 1 970s, the available information indicates that there were 100,000 abortions per year. That total decreased with time. In the mid1980s there were around 50,000 abortions per year. In 1992 - just before abortion was banned - official data shows around 2 3 ,000 abortions were performed per year.
Obviously, the decreasing number of abortions was related to the social changes that occurred since 1980 - the bloom of democracy and "Solidarnosc," or the Solidarity movement. At the same time, there was increasing access to contraceptives and better information about sexuality. What is the real number of abortions in Poland now, when access to contraceptives...