Poland’s First Abortion Clinic in Decades Is a Challenge to Parliament

Outside a grey building on Wiejska Street in Warsaw, red paint streaks the sidewalk. It’s been a few days since protesters covered the building’s windows with posters referencing genocide and Hitler, and played the sound of babies crying over loudspeakers outside. “It felt like a scene from a zombie movie,” said Natalia Broniarczyk, an activist who’d been sheltering inside at the time.

The abortion clinic is the first to open in Poland in decades, according to the group behind it. When the country’s nationalist Law & Justice party was in power from 2015 to 2023, it tightened reproductive-rights rules such that abortions are allowed only when a woman’s life is at risk or the pregnancy is a result of a crime. This gave Poland one of the strictest abortion regimes in the European Union. The country’s current nationalist president, Andrzej Duda, has said he will veto any bill to liberalize abortion laws.