WARSAW, Poland (AP) – People across Poland stayed away from work and crowds gathered in street protests for the seventh straight day on Wednesday to express anger at a Supreme Court ruling banning abortions for fetal abnormalities.
Protesters in Warsaw marched from the office of Ordo Iuris, a conservative group that has campaigned for a total ban on abortion, to the Parliament building, which was surrounded by police in riot gear. Large crowds also filled the streets in other major cities, including Kraków, Wroclaw, Szczecin and Lodz.
In parliament, Poland’s most powerful politician, ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, lashed out at opposition lawmakers, accusing them from the podium of inciting people to protest during the pandemic.
“You are destroying Poland,” said Kaczynski. “You put many people to death, you are criminals.”
The nationwide strike and protests come amid a deepening standoff between angry protesters and Poland’s deeply conservative government, which has been pushing last Thursday’s court ruling and has vowed not to back down.
READ MORE: Poland leader wants churches defended and condemns protests
“I am so angry! You have no right to decide my life, my personal choices, my future,” said Julka Wojciechowska, 19, a student protesting in Warsaw. “You don’t understand young people. They don’t understand the world now, but they try to regulate our lives. We will never allow that.”
Daily protests since Poland’s Constitutional Court decision have exposed deep divisions in this central European nation of 38 million, long a bastion of conservative Catholicism and now undergoing rapid societal change.
Anger at the ruling that would deny women legal abortions even with fatal birth defects is directed at the Roman Catholic Church and ruling party leader Kaczynski.
Kaczynski has said in the past that even with severely damaged fetuses that have no chance of surviving outside the womb, pregnancies “should still end in childbirth so that the child can be baptized, buried, given a name.”
On Sunday, women entered Polish churches to disrupt services, confronted priests with obscenities and spray-painted church buildings.
Kaczynski late Tuesday accused the protesters of wanting to “destroy Poland” and called on his party supporters to defend the churches “at all costs”.
He spoke to a camera backed by Polish flags in an announcement that some critics likened to an infamous 1981 announcement of martial law by communist leader Wojciech Jaruzelski to crack down on anti-regime protests.
Some saw Kaczynski’s words as a call for violence. The 71-year-old also holds the office of Deputy Prime Minister and is responsible for the police and security services.
On Sunday, members of some far-right groups and football fans surrounded churches in defense and in some cases provoked skirmishes with protesters and police.
Szymon Holownia, the founder of a new centrist political movement, said that Kaczynski “in the name of defending the church wants to set the country on fire and drown it in blood.”
The conservative rulers have tried to portray the masses of mostly young people led by women’s rights activists as “fascists”.
READ MORE: Women’s groups hold more protests against Poland’s abortion law
“Left-wing fascism is destroying Poland,” read a headline on state television on Tuesday, reflecting language used by US President Donald Trump.
Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski on Wednesday promised the police “decisive action in the face of further attempts at similar aggression and desecration announced by the leaders and organizers of the protests”.
He said 76 people had been arrested in connection with the protests at churches and prosecutors were conducting proceedings in 101 cases.
Despite the rapid spread of the coronavirus, people have taken to the streets in large numbers, with a record 18,820 new cases and 236 new deaths over the past day.
Polish President Andrzej Duda, who is in isolation after testing positive for COVID-19, said last week he supported the court ruling. His daughter Kinga Duda, who was appointed as her father’s unpaid adviser on social issues, said on Wednesday that she could not accept the Constitutional Court’s ruling.
Kinga Duda said that any woman carrying a fetus that could die within moments of birth should be left to decide what to do, as she will be the “one who will face the consequences of her decision for the rest of her life.” must wear”.
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