Thousands Protest Across Poland Six Years After Near-Total Abortion Ban

In Warsaw, about 1,000 people stood in front of parliament in the rain on Thursday, demanding access to free and legal abortion. They were one part of a wider day of action: thousands of demonstrators turned out in more than 20 towns and cities across Poland, timed to the sixth anniversary of the near-total ban imposed by the country's highest court.

Under the current rules, abortion is legal in Poland only when a pregnancy results from a criminal act such as rape or incest, or when it threatens the life or health of the mother. Restrictive law has stood since 1993, and Polish women have campaigned against it ever since. In 2016, nationwide demonstrations saw women wearing black in protest. Yet the law moved in the opposite direction: in 2020, under the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government, abortions of foetuses with congenital defects were banned.

The protests come days after parliament passed two bills that would ease the restrictions in this largely Catholic country. Prime Minister Donald Tusk's government had promised to liberalise abortion law before its 2023 election victory, but divisions inside the coalition have slowed progress. The bills are now expected to be vetoed by President Karol Nawrocki, a conservative.

Activists see the timing as telling. Zofia Marcinek of the Abortion Dream Team, a reproductive rights group in Warsaw, called the votes "token gestures" rather than a genuine attempt at reform. In her account, the liberal government knew the drafts could not survive a Nawrocki veto and passed them a year before the next parliamentary election to give the impression of action, because it needs women's support at the ballot box.

The organisers of Thursday's protests go further, saying the Tusk government has betrayed Polish women. They also argue that the prime minister's claims that access to abortion has improved on his watch have made care harder for some. Marcinek described the government's promises as "a type of disinformation." Women who become pregnant hear the prime minister say everything is fine and that access exists, she said, then reach a hospital and find otherwise. By the time they turn to her group, it is very late, and help is complicated and expensive.

Emilia Niemiec, 36, manages the AboTak abortion centre, which gives women resources including pills, along with a space to seek support or carry out a pharmacological abortion. "Over the last six years, nothing has really changed," she said.

The numbers point to a gap between law and practice. Polish hospitals performed 573 abortions in the first half of 2026, according to National Health Fund data, compared with 452 in all of 2022, before Tusk took office. Activists say, however, that tens of thousands of abortions happen each year outside hospitals. The overwhelming majority are done by women at home using pills obtained from outside the country.

Polish law does not hold women criminally responsible for undergoing an abortion, including by taking pills. People who help them, among them doctors and family members, can potentially be prosecuted.

What to watch now is Nawrocki's expected veto of the two bills, and how abortion figures into the coalition's positioning as next year's parliamentary election approaches.