"Tusk let us down” – Polish women protest for abortion rights

In more than twenty cities and smaller towns across Poland women took to the streets on Thursday, because three years ago Donald Tusk's liberal government promised to ease the country's extremely strict abortion law, yet legal and free termination of pregnancy is still barely accessible today. The protesters were not appeased even by the fact that the Polish parliament passed two bills on Tuesday that would relax the rules, since it is almost certain that conservative President Karol Nawrocki will veto both of them.

Tusk's pro-European coalition owed its 2023 election victory in no small part to its promise to liberalize abortion regulations, but the prime minister admitted as early as 2024 that he could not override a conservative president's veto. At the time, Andrzej Duda was still head of state; last year he was succeeded by Nawrocki, who was elected as the candidate of the Law and Justice party (PiS), so the government's task has not gotten any easier since. Tusk therefore chose a roundabout path: instead of amending the law, he introduced measures preventing hospitals from citing religious beliefs to refuse procedures permitted by law. “The state will increasingly stand by women when they make the most important decisions of their lives,” he said at the time.

According to Zofia Marcinek, an activist with the Warsaw-based reproductive rights group Abortion Dream Team, the current vote, held a year before the next parliamentary election, is much more of a “symbolic gesture” than a real reform. She believes the government knew very well that the bills would fail because of Nawrocki's veto, but since it will need women's votes in next year's election, it at least wanted to create the impression that it is doing something. According to the activists, Tusk not only let Polish women down, but his statements have also made it harder for them to get medical help.

“Pregnant women hear from the prime minister that everything is fine, that they have access to abortion, then they go to the hospital and find out that this is not the case at all. By the time they turn to us, it is often too late, and their situation is so complicated and expensive that we can barely help them”

said Marcinek. She added that it has also become harder to raise money abroad, because international donors have heard from Tusk that the situation in Poland is already different.

According to data from Poland's national health insurance fund, 573 abortions were performed in hospitals in the first half of 2026, compared with 452 for the whole of 2022, before Tusk came to power. Activists say, however, that tens of thousands of pregnancies are terminated outside hospitals every year, mostly abroad or using pills ordered by mail. In Poland, since 1993 a pregnancy can only be legally terminated if the mother's life or health is in danger, or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. A severe fetal abnormality also used to count as such a reason, but during the PiS government, the Constitutional Court declared this unconstitutional in October 2020; the ruling took effect in 2021 and triggered weeks of mass protests. In the predominantly Catholic country, abortion has remained one of the most divisive issues in public life ever since, still treated by many as taboo, while women have been fighting for three decades now to ease the rules.

Ugar