Had the project been voted, Poland would have become Salvador of Europe; luckily for women, this did not happen. The project equalized abortion with murder and made it a crime punishable with 5 to 25 years in prison or even life imprisonment for the woman and the person who performed her abortion.
The project was submitted to the Parliament in September – the Pro-Life Foundation informed that nearly 130 thousand people signed it. This is the same organization that is behind the introduction of a similar bill into the Polish public debate in 2011, 2013 and 2016, each time without success. Another initiative of the organization is the „Stop Pedophilia” campaign, which proclaims – with the help of publicity trucks and banners, among other things – that homosexuality directly leads to pedophilia.
The authors of the project claim that „legal protection of the life of conceived children is a fiction in Poland”. The originators also suggested the introduction of a new definition of „conceived child” to the Criminal Code: „A child is a human being in the period from conception to adulthood; a conceived child is a child in the period until the beginning of childbirth within the meaning of Article 149”. – reads the draft.
The Sejm by a majority of 361 votes rejected the bill „Stop the abortion” in the first reading, that is – at the earliest possible stage of parliamentary procedure.
All members of the Civic Coalition (118 votes), the New Left (46 votes), the Polish Coalition (20 votes), Polska 2050 (8 votes) and Porozumienie (4 votes) voted against the bill.
Among the Law and Justice MPs 155 voted against. There were 41 for further works on the bill and 12 abstentions. Six MPs of the extreme right Confederation and one non-attached MP (Lukasz Mejza, Deputy Minister of Sport and Tourism) also voted against the rejection of the bill.
For the ruling Law and Justice, the project seemed too radical. Progressing inflation, as well as growing unrest over the progress of the fourth wave of COVID-19, put it in a no-win situation. It had to reject the project, claiming that „it resembles with its radicalism the actions of the left”.
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