Polish court orders retrial of woman found guilty of helping terminate pregnancy

A Polish court has ordered a retrial in the case of an activist found guilty of helping a woman to terminate her pregnancy in a symbolic moment for Poland’s abortion rights movement.

Justyna Wydrzyńska was sentenced to community service in 2023 in the first such case for an activist in the EU country, which has a near-total abortion ban and outlaws abortion assistance.

Donald Tusk’s centrist governing party has so far not garnered enough support in parliament to push through its pre-election pledge to ease these laws. But an appeals court on Thursday overturned “the contested judgment in its entirety”. The judge, Rafal Kaniok, cited doubts over the impartiality of the presiding judge who delivered the sentence in 2023.

Supporters of Wydrzyńska – including from her Abortion Dream Team nonprofit organisation, which helps women carry out abortions – gathered in the court.

“For me, this is not a victory,” Wydrzyńska told AFP after the ruling. “The only outcome I would consider a victory today would have been if this court had said: ‘Yes, you are innocent.’”

A handful of anti-abortion activists were also present outside the building, reciting Catholic prayers.

Currently, women can get an abortion in hospital only if the pregnancy results from sexual assault or incest or poses a direct threat to the life or health of the mother. Abortion assistance is punishable by up to three years in jail.

A network of abortion rights groups, Abortion Without Borders, said that it dealt with an “overwhelming number of inquiries from people seeking abortion support” in Poland or abroad. In 2024, the network “supported 47,000 people in accessing abortion care”, it said in a report released last month.

“Abortion in Poland is a daily reality,” it added, estimating that up to 150,000 abortions were carried out each year in the predominantly Catholic country.

But according to official numbers, only about 780 of those were performed in Polish hospitals in the first 10 months of 2024.

In August, the prime minister conceded there was “simply no majority” to deliver on his party’s pledge to allow abortion until the 12th week of pregnancy in the current parliamentary term. One of his senior lawmakers announced last month that work on relaxing the rules, some of Europe’s strictest, would resume only after the presidential election scheduled for May.

Four bills to loosen the abortion law had been debated in a parliamentary committee, but even if they got the green light from lawmakers, Poland’s conservative president, Andrzej Duda, has indicated he will veto them.