Content area
Full Text
Poland: Feminists vs. the Church
Ursula Nowakowska, a founding member of the Polish Feminist Association, is in Washington this year to participate in a congressional fellow program.
Nowakowska discusses the history of the fight against the Roman Catholic Church's successful attempt to virtually ban abortion in Poland, then describes ways women have been trying to circumvent the ban -- many travel to other countries for abortions -- and other issues Polish feminists face, such as violence against women, which has increased as a result of the abortion ban (women refuse to have sex with men without access to abortion, and the men beat them).
Nowakowska: I was one of the founding members of the Polish Feminist Association. We registered our association with the government in 1989. Really, the group started in 1980, as a discussion group at Warsaw University, developing from a sociology seminar on gender. The first group was very small.
I made contact with this group of feminists in 1986. I was part of the Freedom and Peace group and at its conference I met a Canadian woman who told me about the feminist group.
We talked about registering our organization much earlier, but some other independent groups tried to register and were refused, so we waited. We decided to register in 1989, which was a time of big changes in Poland. We decided it was more important to be recognized because of the fight against abortion that was being launched by the Catholic Church. In early 1989, when the Communists were still in power, the first bill banning abortion was introduced in the parliament, so we realized we had to register to work against it. Also, there was a new law that made it easier to register. But we had some problems because we had worked for a long time without a leader and the court said we had to have one person as a leader to register. But we succeeded in registering without picking one leader. We were the only group that succeeded in registering that way; other groups had the same problem but were not successful in registering without picking a leader.
The main issue for the organization has been abortion.
church's children's crusade
cad: What kind of response...