Polish pro-choice activists Justyna Wydrzynska (center) and Natalia Broniarczyk (right) of the ‘Abortion Dream Team’ women’s rights group react as representatives from La France Insoumise party Manon Aubry (left) and Mathilde Panot delivered around 300 abortion pills for Poland’s first activist-run abortion consultation point in Warsaw, Poland, on April 29, 2025. French hard-left politicians visited Poland on Tuesday to bring abortion and morning-after pills and show support to activists in the Catholic country whose termination laws are some of Europe’s most stringent. — Photo by Agence France-Presse
French hard-left politicians visited Poland on Tuesday to bring abortion and morning-after pills, in a show of support for activists, to the Catholic country whose termination laws are among Europe’s most stringent.
Representatives from the France Unbowed (LFI) party delivered around 300 pills to activists in Warsaw, and vowed to send more in the future.
Poland has a near-total ban on abortion. Assisting abortion is punishable by jail but no law penalises women if they carry out their own abortion with pills ordered online.
“We are bringing something to help women who want to terminate a pregnancy because whatever the situation, women’s bodies belong to neither the state nor the Church, but to women and women alone,” Mathilde Panot, chief of LFI’s parliamentary party, told AFP while visiting Poland’s first abortion centre.
The Polish government has yet to comment on the visit.
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Last month, nonprofit Abortion Dream Team opened the centre just opposite parliament to put pressure on lawmakers while offering a space where women considering terminating a pregnancy can get help.
Activist Justyna Wydrzynska told AFP the French visit was “a show of political support for us, support that we don’t have from politicians in Poland.”
Currently, women in Poland can only get an abortion in the hospital if the pregnancy results from sexual assault or incest or poses a direct threat to the life or health of the mother.
Before coming to power, Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition pledged to ease these laws, but has so far lacked the support in parliament to push through the changes.
Just under 900 abortions were performed in hospital last year in the country of 38 million people, according to official numbers.
But tens of thousands more terminate pregnancies every year at home — using pills — or by going abroad, according to women’s rights groups.
Some of these women go to France, which last year became the first EU nation to include the right to abortion in its constitution.
It has marked a reversal from historic policies, an LFI politician noted.
Decades ago, “when abortion was not legal in France, French women would come to Poland to abort,” said Manon Aubry, leader of the LFI’s MPs in the European Parliament.
“Now, we’re providing solidarity in the opposite direction.”