WARSAW — Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party is tightening ties with the country’s powerful Roman Catholic Church, as party leaders in recent days endorsed a total abortion ban pushed by the Church hierarchy.
The proposal to toughen what is already one of Europe’s strictest abortion laws sent thousands of people onto the streets in protest over the weekend. Some even stormed out of churches Sunday as priests read anti-abortion sermons.
Despite the immediate backlash, the church-state alliance could prove mutually beneficial.
For the Catholic Church, the political environment is as favorable as it can get to enact the abortion crackdown. The conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party dominates the parliament, and there are no left-wing parties in the legislature at all. “It’s hard to be surprised that the bishops are on the offensive,” said Marek Migalski, a political scientist who was a former PiS-backed MEP before breaking with the party.
The Law and Justice party is under domestic and foreign attack for legal changes that critics charge have led to a constitutional crisis. Solid support from the church could shore up the party’s political position.
This latest tie-in continues a long-standing relationship between PiS and the church, which has repeatedly aided the party and in return has seen politicians championing church-backed proposals.
Poland’s current law, which was passed in 1993, allows for abortions if the mother’s health is at risk, if the pregnancy is the result of a rape or incest, or if the fetus is disabled or terminally ill.
Poland registered about 1,800 legal abortions in 2014, according to the country’s National Health Fund. According to the Federation of Women and Family Planning, a reproductive rights group, the true number of abortions ranges from 80,000 to 200,000 a year, some of them performed illegally in Poland and the rest in other EU countries with less restrictive laws.
Upending the status quo
The Church has long been unhappy with the 1993 compromise, but efforts to push through even stricter laws have failed, as politicians worried about the electoral consequences. The last time that PiS was in power, from 2005 to 2007, some of the party’s religious hardliners quit in protest when party leader Jarosław Kaczyński balked at changing the abortion law.
But this time Kaczyński holds an absolute majority in parliament, and opinion polls show a steady rise in disapproval of abortion.
A new survey by the CBOS organization found only 53 percent of those polled support abortion if the fetus is damaged, down from 71 percent in 1992. Support for abortion in the event of rape or incest is still high, although it dropped from 80 percent to 73 percent over that period, while 80 percent back abortion if a mother’s life is in danger, down from 88 percent in 1992.
“If I was to make a prediction in this matter, I am convinced that the overwhelming majority of the [parliamentary] club, and maybe all of them, supports this proposition,” Kaczyński told reporters last week. “In these matters, as a Catholic, I follow the teachings of the bishops.”
Beata Szydło, chosen by Kaczyński to be prime minister, also supports the measure, although she stressed it was her “private opinion.” The new law is being drafted by a private group called Stop Abortion, not the government. It needs to gather at least 100,000 signatures backing the measure to put it on the legislative agenda.
Poland’s Prime Minister Beata Szydło | Janek Skarzynski/AFP via Getty Images
On Sunday, priests read a pastoral letter in favor of a new law.
“There are no compromises when it comes to human life,” Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz, the archbishop of Warsaw, said at mass on Saturday.
So far, the church and PiS have been lucky with their opponents. The parliamentary opposition is weak and divided. Videos of women yelling at priests during sermons has created sympathy for the church, with many Poles expressing discomfort at open protests during religious ceremonies.
Migalski compared the reaction to the outrage in Russia when punk rockers Pussy Riot staged a 2012 protest in a Moscow cathedral, which left many ordinary Russians aghast and actually boosted support for Vladimir Putin.
“If the face of the opposition is aggressive feminists yelling in church, then it helps PiS,” he said.
The abortion issue is a key one for the Church, but there are many other areas where party and Church work closely together.
The broadly conservative upper hierarchy of the Church has long been more favorably inclined towards Law and Justice, and that support strengthened last year when former president Bronisław Komorowski, backed by the centrist Civic Platform party, signed a law that refunded in vitro fertilization procedures over Church protests.
“The Church swung behind Law and Justice,” said Norbert Maliszewski, a political scientist at the University of Warsaw.
Church and state in harmony
That political bargain has paid off for both sides.
While the church isn’t powerful enough to single-handedly dictate politics — something it tried and failed to do in the early 1990s — it can play a decisive role at the margins.
That support from the pulpit helped PiS win its parliamentary majority in October, with some priests, especially in rural parishes, openly calling for worshippers to vote for PiS.
The Catholic church even stepped in to defend the ruling party in February, when a well-known columnist wrote an article critical of the new government for EuropeInfos, the newsletter of the Bishops’ Conferences of the EU. Polish bishops threatened to withdraw from the EU organization unless the article was pulled.
Bishops have also castigated the growing anti-government protest movement.
In an Easter sermon, Józef Michalik, archbishop of the eastern city of Przemyśl, denounced those who “mobilize foreign nations in international groupings to hate Poles who had the courage to elect other people,” comparing the government’s opponents to historical traitors.
Archbishop Jozef Michalik (L), and archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki | Janek Skarzynski/AFP/Getty Images
The church also gained from having a right-wing government.
Tadeusz Rydzyk, founder of the ultra-Catholic Radio Maryja network, last month got 200,000 złotys (€89,000) for one of his foundations from the foreign ministry for public diplomacy.
Religious organizations are also among the few beneficiaries of a controversial new law restricting ownership rights for farmland. The Church will not face the limits on buying land that apply to most other owners.
“That could earn it enormous sums,” said Migalski.
The health ministry will halt financing in vitro procedures by the end of June, and it is also moving to stop the sale of “day after” contraception pills without prescriptions. The European Commission determined last year that the ellaOne day-after pill should be sold without prescription in EU countries.
A bigger role for religion
The church is also pushing hard for religion to be made a formal school subject on par with other subjects, like biology, mathematics and Polish, an idea that recently gained the support of the education minister.
Although both PiS and the church are now riding high, Maliszewski warned that if they press their advantage too aggressively, they could spark a counter-reaction and the next parliament could undo many of the steps now being backed by the church.
Maliszewski felt that the likeliest outcome of a new abortion law would be to ban abortions of a disabled fetus, but still allow abortion to save a mother or in the event of rape or incest.
“The church should be aware that PiS can push through a total abortion ban, but the long-term consequences for the church could be harmful as Poles broadly back the existing compromise,” he said.
There is also a danger that being too close to the government could erode support for the church. Although Poland is still one of the most religious countries in the EU, an annual church-run survey of the number of people actually showing up in pews on Sunday has steadily fallen from 50 percent of Poles in 1990 to 39 percent in 2014.
“Taking up this matter, besides its positive consequences, could also mean that various left-wing groupings get wind in their sails,” Ryszard Terlecki, head of PiS’s parliamentary wing, told Polish television on Monday, but he stressed that that if the citizens’ project is finalized, “parliament will take it up.”