Human Life International claims to have 20 centers in Ukraine, but few people familiar with the situation here believe that Ukraine or Russia are fertile ground for widespread anti-abortion movements or open legal bans such as those imposed two years ago in neighboring heavily Catholic Poland. Pending Polish medical approval, Marchenko is working with Federa, a Polish women`s rights organization, to set up a Ukrainian-language helpline for women seeking help accessing reproductive health services. She says the hotline receives about 10 calls a day, 10 percent of which are inquiries on how to access an abortion. A Planned Parenthood program to distribute birth control materials and counseling in 13 Russian cities is also reducing the number of abortions in those regions. SHAPIRO: Do you say this carefully because in Poland it is a crime to give someone an abortion pill? SHAPIRO: Zuzanna Dziuban is one of many women who identify as Ciocia Basia. The B in Basia stands for Berlin. Dziuban is Polish, but she lives in Germany, where abortion is widespread. SHAPIRO: She is a Ukrainian-Polish interpreter. And when refugee women have to terminate a pregnancy, they confide in it.
But she says they rarely ask directly. They use euphemisms. Even Ukrainian health officials, alarmed by the abortion rate, do not see this as a question of morality. In Ukraine, abortions are offered by law upon request during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, oral contraception is sold over-the-counter without a prescription, and the morning-after pill is readily available. In Poland, abortion is almost completely banned and access to contraceptives is considered the worst in Europe, according to the European Parliamentary Forum. Many doctors refuse to prescribe emergency contraception or even IUDs (intrauterine devices) on ethical grounds, as they resemble an abortion. SHAPIRO: Zuzanna Dziuban told me that the name of her band, Aunt Basia, comes from a Kenyan collective called Auntie Jane. This group takes its name from the Jane Collective, the underground organization that allowed people access to abortion in the United States before it was legal. The Jane Collective was dissolved after the Supreme Court rejected abortion in Roe v. Wade of 1973.
Despite the grim conditions, a young Ukrainian anti-abortion activist who tried to dissuade women from making her decision that day was unlucky. When they found out she was 20 and had no children, “they told her to have three children, feed and clothe them with our $30 monthly salary, and then come back and talk to us,” Pohorelova recalls. But legal abortion has fallen in and out of official Soviet favor over the years, seemingly alongside rising and falling death rates. SHAPIRO: Technically, Polish law allows abortion in cases of rape. However, according to the Polish Ministry of Health, the country has never had more than three such cases in one year. Kacpura says the government makes it virtually impossible to terminate a pregnancy, even for rape victims. Statistics like these make the region a new territory for American anti-abortion activists. Since then, abortion has been possible on demand, paid for by the state, up to the 12th week of pregnancy. Abortion in Ukraine is legal upon request during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. Between the 12th and 28th week, abortion is possible for a variety of reasons, including medical, social and personal, and for any reason with the approval of a medical commission.
[1] The Aborcyzhny Dream Team, a group that helps women obtain abortion pills abroad, says 158 Ukrainians have contacted them since the conflict began. Instead, Marchenko and her patient, like millions across the country, fled to safety and crossed the Polish border, where abortions are illegal due to fetal abnormalities — or “eugenic” reasons in the language of the country`s Constitutional Court. When the first Russian bombs fell on Ukraine, Myroslava Marchenko was a gynecologist in a private clinic in Kiev. The next day, one of her patients was supposed to have an abortion after prenatal tests showed a high probability of Down syndrome. Fedotovich, for example, took a medical view, saying, “So many abortions are not good for women`s health.” WYDRZYNSKA: Because she couldn`t travel abroad. He told her that if she was traveling with her 2-year-old child, he would report a kidnapping to the police. And after that, when he was blackmailing her, she decided to just ask if you could please send me pills, but please do it completely secretly. But somehow he got the information because he called the police and said they were getting help from someone. She received pills from someone. Between 2010 and 2020, fewer than five legal abortions per year were performed for rape in Poland, with women requiring permission from a prosecutor. “Only 25 percent of all pregnant women who came to see us in the first trimester of this year had an abortion,” Fedotovich said.Oksana Litvinenko asked to meet us at our hotel in Warsaw, not at her home or office, because anti-abortion protesters have personally targeted her, so she is taking precautions. My colleague interprets as she speaks. In Soviet times, birth control devices were of poor quality, if they could be found. Plastic IUDs have often failed. Rubber condoms resembling balloons have earned the nickname “galoshes” and the eternal dislike of men. The diaphragms were distributed without spermicides. “My only hope is that none of the Ukrainian women who need an abortion will try to get it legally in Poland,” Lytvynenko said. “I hope they will go further west to Germany. Because as soon as they explain the pregnancy to the doctor, it`s over for them. Members of Poland`s anti-abortion movement were also at the border to welcome the refugees. In the first weeks of the war, Life and Family volunteers began distributing leaflets in refugee reception sites representing dismembered fetuses and citing abortion as the greatest threat to peace.
The leaflets also advised pregnant women to report anyone who offered them an abortion to the police. SHAPIRO: Krystyna Kacpura is the director of the women`s rights group Federa. This is one of the organizations behind these flyers in Port-a-Potties at the border. Federa was founded in 1991. At that time, abortion was widespread in Poland. Lately, she has worked extensively with Ukrainian refugees, some of whom have been raped. After the USSR legalized abortion in 1921, it was quickly accepted by increasingly educated and urbanized Soviet women. This article related to abortion is a heel.
You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. Towards the end of a lengthy interview in 2019 during his political campaign, Volodymyr Zelensky (now President of Ukraine) was asked about abortion rights. The interviewer mentioned to Zelensky that in Central and Eastern Europe, laws are often passed that cause a public outcry, and said that there were large demonstrations in Poland, for example, when the Polish government wanted to ban abortion. Zelensky said abortion should not be banned, abortion is a personal choice and there must be less interference with human freedom. [7] In 1925, 55% of all pregnancies in Ukraine ended in abortion – almost the same rate as today – according to official statistics.
