“All pregnant women are in danger”: the death of a young woman provoked protests in Poland

In Poland broke out after the death of the future mother in the hospital. The Ombudsman ruled that the Nowy Targ hospital failed to tell 33-year-old Dorotha Lalik that her life was in danger and that she could be saved with an abortion.

“Stop killing us,” protesters across Poland chanted this evening, demanding the legalization of abortion, after media reports surfaced of a pregnant woman dying in a hospital in May.

Poland’s Patient Ombudsman Bartłomiej Chmiełowiec said on Monday that the John Paul II Hospital should have told Dorotha Lalik, 33, that her life could be saved with an abortion. The Ombudsman ruled that the hospital violated the rights of the unfortunate woman by withholding information.

The woman died in a hospital in Nowy Targ, in the south of the country, on May 24, three days after her admission.

“No one told us that we had practically no chance of having a healthy baby … All this time they gave us false hope that everything would be fine … that in the worst case, the child would be premature,” Lalique’s husband told Polish media. “No one gave us a choice or a chance to save Dorota because no one told us her life was in danger.”

In 2021, a 30-year-old woman named Isabella, died in the Polish city of Pszczyna under similar circumstances after she was denied an abortion, prompting protests and drawing attention to how the 2020 ruling affects pregnancy with complications.

Abortion is still legal in Poland if the pregnancy poses a risk to the health or life of the pregnant woman or is the result of a crime such as rape or incest. However, in 2020, Poland’s constitutional court declared abortion unconstitutional due to fetal abnormalities. According to Jolanta Budzowska, a lawyer representing the Lalique and Isabela families, the decision had a “freezing effect” on Polish doctors.

“If [врачи] will have an abortion too early, and prosecutors will then decide that there was no danger to the mother, they could face up to three years in prison, ”she told The Guardian in 2021.

Marta Lempart, founder of the All-Polish Women’s Strike, which organized many of the protests, said: “All pregnant women are in danger the moment they are sent to a Polish hospital. We are afraid of all doctors because we do not know which of them will take action to prevent the death of their patient. This is another hospital death caused by doctors’ decision to deny access to legal abortion. We again saw how doctors lie and deceive the family and passively wait for the patient to die of sepsis.”

“The anti-abortion legislation in Poland is very restrictive,” added Marta Lempart. “But doctors deny access to abortions, which are legal. Their interpretation of the law is stricter than that of the government.”

The Polish Ministry of Health reacted to Lalique’s death by calling on a team of experts to develop “more detailed standards” for obstetricians.

“In Poland, every woman whose health and life is in danger has the right to terminate a pregnancy, that is, to have an abortion,” Health Minister Adam Niedzielski said on Monday. “Health means not only physical health, but also mental health,” he added.

Marta Lempart emphasizes: “It is hard to say that only the government is to blame for this situation, when doctors refuse to perform legal abortions in cases where not only health, but even life is at stake.”

In 2005, the then director of the hospital where Dorota Lalique died reportedly announced that the hospital would not perform any abortions because the procedure was contrary to “the law of God and the teachings of the pope.” According to the Polish edition of Gazeta Wyborcza, the hospital has not performed a single abortion since at least 2018.

The current director of the hospital, Marek Wirzba, is a member of the local council of the right-wing Sovereign Poland party, which has been described as “Catholic-nationalist” and supports a ban on abortion.

“After the protests in 2020, everyone in Poland knows the Abortion Without Borders number [организации, которая предоставляет таблетки для прерывания беременности]says Marta Lempart. – But not everyone understood that if you are pregnant and end up in a Polish hospital, you might not leave alive. What should you be prepared for; you must have a lawyer’s phone number and contacts with the media ready, and you must continue to fight and argue and not believe a single word of anyone, because you may not be alive. That’s why we protest. We want to raise the alarm: if you are pregnant, it can happen to you if you are not ready to fight for your life.”