Poland’s restrictive abortion laws have created a vast black market where doctors frequently charge a month’s salary for each procedure.
Analysis by Agata Chelstowska at the University of Warsaw suggests the total income from such unregulated operations to be over £65m (300m Polish Zlotys) per year.
In her report, published in Reproductive Health Matters, Chelsowska draws attention to a subject which is taboo in Polish society as the Roman Catholic Church, which forbids the procedure, exerts a growing influence in politics.
Until 1988, the year which witnessed the widespread strikes that would lead to the fall of the communist government, abortion was legal and accessible in Poland. In fact, it may have been one of the favoured methods of birth control as contraception was not easily available.
However, when the democratic coalition led by Lech Walesa’s Solidarność rose to power the following year this was, writes Chelstowska, a “victory also for the church, which took an active role in shaping the young state’s political agenda.” In 1993, a law was passed criminalising abortion apart from cases where the pregnancy presents a risk to the woman’s physical or mental health or is the result of rape or incest.
Yet the 1993 abortion law is incompletely enforced and doctors who perform the procedure privately are rarely prosecuted even when they advertise their services in the back pages of newspapers. Chelstowska estimates that 150,000 abortions were carried out in Poland last year.
Indeed it was an advertising campaign by a mysterious Polish feminist organisation called SROM (Polish for “vulva”) that put the issue of abortion in Poland on the centre pages of the UK press a couple of months ago. Riffing on a MasterCard campaign, the advertisement read:
Airplane ticket to Great Britain: 300 Zlotys. Accommodation: 240 Zlotys. Abortion pills in a public clinic: 0 Zlotys. Relief after a procedure carried out in respectable conditions – priceless. For everything else you pay less than you would to use the Polish underground.
By contrast, according to Chelstowska, a clandestine surgical abortion in Poland costs between 1500 and 2500 Zlotys (£330 to £550) and a medical abortion 400 to 1000 Zlotys (£90 to £200). The average monthly income in Poland is just over 1000 Zlotys.
Although patient safety and wellbeing may be a priority for many doctors running private abortion clinics, opportunities exist for cutting corners in such an unregulated, clandestine system.
Wanda Nowicka, executive director of the Polish Federation for Women and Family Planning, says that doctors are nonetheless complicit with the current state of affairs that puts the health of women at risk. “Doctors do not want to perform abortions in public hospitals,” she says. “They are ready, however, to take that risk when a woman comes to their private practice. We are talking about a vast, untaxed source of income. That is why the medical profession is not interested in changing the abortion law.”
Image credit: zakwitnij (Flickr)
Chełstowska, A. (2011). Stigmatisation and commercialisation of abortion services in Poland: turning sin into gold Reproductive Health Matters, 19 (37), 98-106 DOI: 10.1016/S0968-8080(11)37548-9
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