WARSAW (POLAND) – Poland witnessed thousands of activists disrupting church services on Sunday, chanting slogans during mass and spraying graffiti on walls to protest against a court ruling that amounts to a near-total ban on abortion.
It was the first mega demonstration targeting churches in the predominantly Roman Catholic country. Crowds of protesters carried posters showing a crucified woman and handed out protest cards to priests.
A ruling of a Constitutional Court forbidding abortions because of foetal defects has sparked four days of protests.
The ruling has eliminated the most common legal ground allowing abortion and further alienating it from the EU mainstream because of its conservative stance.
In the city of Katowice, 7,000 protesters assembled in front of the cathedral, chanting “this is war” and “human law, not ecclesiastical law”. After officers were attacked, police used tear gas to disperse protesters, said state news agency PAP.
In Poznan, three dozen protesters interrupted mass as they held banners that read “Catholic women also need their right to abortion”.
“Our rage should be directed towards politicians, but also towards senior church figures as they have also added to this women’s hell that the authorities are preparing,” said Mateusz Sulwinski, one of the protest organisers in Poznan.
Activists blame conservative ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), for pressuring the court to tighten restrictions to appeal to the party’s base and to please the influential Church.
It is a fact that Church leaders also wield political power.
“The Church does not constitute the law in our homeland and these are not the bishops who decide on the compliance or non-compliance of laws with the Polish Constitution,” Polish archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki said in a statement.
“However, the Church cannot stop defending life, nor can it abandon the proclamation that every human being must be protected from conception until natural death,” he added.
In Krakow, protesters hung black underwear and clothes on lines between trees – a reference to early protests against tightening of abortion curbs where people wore black to show their solidarity.
In the historic city, protesters sprayed “abortion without borders” on one church. On another church was the line “you have blood on your hands”.
“I’m here today because it annoys me that in a secular country the church decides for me what rights I have, what I can do and what I’m not allowed to do,” said media worker Julia Miotk, 26, during a protest.