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WARSAW (Reuters) – Polish President Andrzej Duda on Friday vetoed a law that planned to liberalize access to the “morning after pill”, an emergency contraception.
The pro-European coalition in power since December, under the aegis of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, had approved a bill allowing free access to the morning-after pill from the age of 15.
Since 2017, this medicinal contraception has only been accessible with a medical prescription, a restriction introduced by the former nationalist and populist government of Law and Justice (PiS), an ally of President Duda.
“The president (…) cannot accept legal solutions allowing children under 18 to have access to contraceptive drugs without medical supervision and ignoring the role and responsibility of parents”, we can read in a press release from the presidency.
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The Head of State, specifies the press release, is however open to the use of the morning-after pill without a medical prescription for adult women.
“Superstitions and conservative ideology have won in the face of science and women’s rights,” lamented a New Left (center-left) MP, Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus, on the X network.
“We, the left, have promised, among other things, the morning after pill to the Poles. We will do it,” she adds.
(Reporting by Alan Charlish and Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk, French version by Sophie Louet, editing by Kate Entringer)
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