WARSAW — A right-wing government in Poland, in league with the Catholic Church and legitimately worried about plummeting birthrates, pushed for the toughest abortion law of any major European country three years ago. The results are now in, providing a telling lesson in unintended consequences.
Hundreds of thousands of furious Poles thronged the streets in the fall of 2020 after a court ruling cleared the way for what amounted to a near-complete ban on abortion. Among the signs they held aloft: “I wish I could abort my government.”
The government was unmoved — no surprise, given the septuagenarian bachelor who controls it. He is Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of the governing Law and Justice party, a vehemently antiabortion politician who says nonviable fetuses should “be baptized, buried and have a name” and blames Poland’s baby bust on young women who drink too much.
The new law scrapped fetal abnormalities as the most significant exception to an abortion ban that had been in place for three decades. After it came into force in January 2021, the tally of legal abortions dropped by 90 percent, to roughly 100, in the first year.
No one knows exactly how many Polish women might have the procedure illegally, or seek it abroad, although the number is likely significant. What is known is that births in Poland, already at a post-World War II low, have plummeted since the country imposed the draconian prohibition, according to the nation’s statistics agency.
In the 12 months ending in September, the number of babies delivered in Poland fell by 11 percent compared with the previous year, a staggering decline. The country’s fertility rate was already among the lowest in Europe, at just 1.3 births per woman of childbearing age in 2021, far below the 2.1 level that demographers say assures population stability. Now, it’s tumbling further.
It’s true that birthrates across much of Europe have been anemic or declining for years. The U.N. Population Fund reported a year ago that nine of the world’s 10 fastest-shrinking countries are in Central and Eastern Europe.
An array of factors — including job insecurity, housing shortages, scarcity of child care and, more recently, the war in Ukraine — is driving the slide in birthrates. Populations in Eastern Europe have also been sapped by people seeking work elsewhere, especially in wealthier Western European countries.
Yet the decline in Poland has accelerated, and more than half of Poles blame the new law. Many Polish women say the obstacles they would face to terminating their pregnancy, even if a fatal birth defect is diagnosed, are a daunting deterrent.
Now, the only way to end a pregnancy is when it results from rape or incest, or if the woman’s health is endangered. And some doctors, who face years in prison if they perform an abortion that doesn’t conform to the law’s stringent exceptions, have been reluctant to help women end their pregnancies in a timely way. That chilling effect appears to have led to unnecessary maternal deaths.
Talk about unintended consequences. Today, fewer than one-third of Polish women ages 18 to 45 say they plan to have babies, down from 41 percent in 2017. That’s the case even though since 2016 the government has made cash payments to families with children, a per-child subsidy set to increase next year to about $200 from $125 monthly.
The abortion law fiasco was one key reason for Law and Justice’s defeat in October’s national elections, in which voters repudiated the party after eight years in power. Shortly after the vote, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki acknowledged as much, saying the law was “a mistake.”
A majority of Poles say they want to liberalize abortion access. That won’t be easy. The coalition that won the elections, set to take power next month, is split on the question. And even if Parliament relaxes the ban, President Andrzej Duda, a conservative Law and Justice loyalist whose term extends into 2025, could veto any new law.
“The abortion issue was very important for millions of voters, some of them who were voting for the first time,” Wojciech Szacki, a political analyst in Warsaw, told me. “And they will be disappointed.”
In fairness, it’s tricky to predict how strict abortion measures will affect birthrates. Not many countries facing a birth dearth have hit on a winning turnaround strategy. In the United States, just-published research suggests births have increased in states that imposed tough abortion bans after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Still, the Polish example is a cautionary tale about the hazards of antiabortion laws. Their effects might be more reliably measured in misery than in maternity wards.
