Polish woman convicted for helping another woman have an abortion

[PurpleParrotfish]

Justyna Wydrzyńska, from an abortion rights NGO, sent abortion tablets to a woman in an abusive relationship whose husband had prevented her from travelling to Germany for an abortion.

Justyna was convicted to eight months of community service at 30 hours a month. She said, “I am still going to help women. I don’t feel guilty. On the contrary, the sentence has made me feel I did the right thing,”

www.politico.eu/article/poland-court-abortion-rights-activist-guilty-facilitating-justyna-wydrzynska/amp/

JFC. Brave woman. I hope the woman she helped is safe and free of her abusive relationship.

I hope so, the wording in the article is that she was ‘at the time’ in an abusive relationship so I hope she is safe and free now.

Oh my god. This is horrendous. Sadly, there are women being sued in Texas for something similar.

What a brave woman. Poland needs to support women, not abusive men!

The EU should make it a condition of joining that abortions should be free, legal and available.
Amnesty International lists it as a human right.

Poland needs booting forcibly out of the EU. As indeed does Hungary. Sadly that is difficult to do.

I agree that access to safe, legal abortion should be part of the accession criteria.

Saw this on the internet.

She broke the law. I don't agree with taking the law into your own hands. If she wants to change the law she should campaign poltically. So much for EU Human rights. Why are they allowed their own laws on abortion.

How do you think kicking Poland and Hungary out of the EU will help women in Poland and Hungary? Why just Poland and Hungary, considering that Malta, which is also in the EU, has an outright ban on abortions?

@Precipice the difference is that when Poland and Hungary joined, they had reasonably democratic governments, an independent judiciary and all the things that EU countries need to have. Now they don't - in effect, they no longer meet the criteria for membership.

In terms of helping women in those countries, exerting enough of a threat of expulsion, which will tank the economy in Poland and Hungary, may help. But it may not - the kind of horrific nationalism that is sweeping Europe right now is driving this and it's powerful. Women do badly under fascist regimes. But it's all the EU can do. This is why it's important to donate to organisations like Abortion without Borders - that's a practical thing we can all do.

Because abortion rights are currently not a criterion for membership, Malta has every right to be a member of the EU. Abortion rights should be a membership criterion, but they aren't. I find Malta's stance on abortion abhorrent.

But Polish judicial reforms aren't relevant to this discussion. If this case were decided in front of a judge in 2015, I can't see that it would have a vastly different outcome. Hungarian policies are even less relevant to this discussion.

Under what clause or article could the EU expel member states? Aside from the problem of the mechanism (which to my recollection doesn't exist and you'd struggle to get unanimity), under the current political situation, the weakening of the EU through the expulsion of member states, especially member states sharing borders with Russia and Ukraine, would be undesirable and unlikely.

I agree that there is no expulsion mechanism (which they really should have thought about), but I disagree that the issue of the Polish judiciary is irrelevant. It's all part of the implementation of an authoritarian fascist regime, straight out of the playbook - as is the Polish abortion ban.

It's true that you won't get agreement under Article 7 - when starting the process against Poland and Hungary, UK Conservative members voted against . But it's incredibly frustrating that this can even happen.

I thought abortion was legal in Hungary

Hungary is starting the process Poland has pretty much completed because Viktor Orban is another nationalist extremist.

Ugh. Sorry to hear that.