“Stop killing us! », « I am not an incubator », « We want doctors not missionaries », chanted several hundred people gathered at the foot of the statue of Copernicus in the center of Warsaw, Wednesday, June 14. At the microphone, pro-choice activists take turns to recount the deaths of Agnieszka, Justyna, Izabela, Anna, Marta and even Dorota: six pregnant women who have perished since the fall of 2020 in public hospitals for failing to obtain medical timely medical termination of pregnancy.
“Not one more! », continues the crowd, which waves the portraits of these six women. The injunction seems to resonate in the void since in the fall of 2021, the death of Izabela, a 30-year-old Polish woman, had aroused great emotion in the country, leading to massive demonstrations with the same words. The medical staff at the Pszczyna hospital in the south of the country then refused to intervene as long as the fetus’s heart was still beating, condemning her to die of septic shock. Poland had just banned a few months earlier, in January 2021, abortion in the event of serious and irreversible malformation of the fetus.
Medical termination of pregnancy remains legal in the event of danger to the life or health of the pregnant woman, such as in the event of rape or incest. Except that health personnel, especially in small provincial public hospitals, are reluctant or slow to carry out these life-saving interventions. These cases of negligence have continued to multiply since the tightening of the right to abortion.
The latest dates back to May 24. That morning, Dorota also dies of septic shock. Twenty weeks pregnant, she was hospitalized on the night of May 20 to 21, after a rupture of amniotic fluid, at the public hospital in Nowy Targ, in southern Poland. “The nurses told him to lie down with his legs up to allow the water to circulate”reported Marcin, her husband, daily Gazeta Wyborcza. “The medical staff wouldn’t let us touch her belly so as not to trigger contractions,” he added.
The hospital employees then dangled the family’s hope of maintaining the pregnancy, which was denied by the medical circumstances. “We were told the story of a woman whose waters broke at 24 weeks but ended up giving birth to a healthy baby at 35 weeks,” again testified the husband of the deceased.
Doctors under pressure, families deceived
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