WARSAW, Poland — Women are organizing street demonstrations in more than 20 Polish cities and towns on Thursday to protest the continued lack of access to free and legal abortion services.
Protesters accuse Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s liberal-led government of failing to deliver on its pledge to ease Poland’s restrictive abortion laws. The demonstrations come despite parliament’s passage of two bills on Tuesday intended to liberalize abortion rules—measures that are widely expected to be vetoed by conservative President Karol Nawrocki.
Zofia Marcinek of the Abortion Dream Team, a Warsaw-based reproductive rights group, characterized the timing of the draft legislation—introduced a year before the next parliamentary election—as “token gestures” rather than a sincere effort to reform abortion law.
Marcinek said the government is aware the draft laws have no realistic chance of surviving Nawrocki’s veto, and is merely creating the appearance of action to secure women’s support ahead of next year’s elections.
Since 1993, abortion has been legal in predominantly Catholic Poland only in cases of severe fetal abnormality, threats to the mother’s life or health, or pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.
Polish women have campaigned for broader abortion rights ever since, including through the nationwide “Black Protest” demonstrations that began in 2016, when participants wore black in solidarity.
Instead of liberalization, Poland’s abortion restrictions were tightened in 2020 under the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government, which banned abortions for fetuses with congenital defects.
Despite the legal restrictions, abortion remains common in Poland, with the vast majority of cases managed by women at home using medication obtained from abroad. While women who terminate pregnancies—including through self-administered pills—are not subject to criminal prosecution, those who assist them, including medical professionals and family members, face potential legal consequences.
Abortion remains a taboo subject in Poland, which now maintains one of the most restrictive abortion regimes in Europe; only Malta imposes stricter limits.
Tusk’s pro-European coalition won the 2023 election partly on a promise to liberalize Poland’s abortion laws. However, in 2024, Tusk acknowledged that his government likely could not overcome a presidential veto. Instead, his administration introduced measures to prevent hospitals from denying legal abortions on religious grounds.
“The state will increasingly stand with women facing dramatic decisions in their lives,” Tusk said in 2024 when announcing those measures.
According to data from the national health fund, Polish hospitals performed 573 abortions in the first half of 2026, compared with 452 in all of 2022, before Tusk took office. Activists, however, say tens of thousands of abortions occur annually outside hospital settings.
Organizers of Thursday’s protests allege that the Tusk government has betrayed Polish women, arguing that the administration’s claims of improved abortion access have, in some cases, made obtaining care more difficult.
“The government’s promises amount to a form of disinformation,” Marcinek told the Associated Press. “Women who become pregnant hear the prime minister say that everything is fine and that abortion access exists, only to discover at the hospital that it does not. As a result, they come to us when their situations have become dangerously late, medically complicated, and costly to address.”
Marcinek added that international donors have grown less inclined to support Polish women’s rights, mistakenly believing that conditions have already improved.
In 2025, the Abortion Dream Team opened an “abortion clinic” opposite the parliament building in Warsaw, where women can receive information about their options or take abortion pills in the presence of supportive activists.
This September, the group also launched a parcel locker at the same site dispensing abortion pills, a device nicknamed “Abortomat.”
Operated by the international feminist nonprofit Women Help Women, the dispenser allows women to obtain abortion pills the next day instead of waiting up to two weeks for home delivery, according to Marcinek.
“Some people cannot safely order such pills to their own address, for instance because of an unsupportive family or an abusive partner,” she said. “These women can receive a PIN code and collect the pills from the machine the following day.”
“In Poland, assisting with an abortion is a criminal offense. Even handing pills to another person can be considered a crime,” the Abortion Dream Team stated. “That is why we are circumventing the Criminal Code and bringing abortion care into the 21st century.”
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