The Conviction of Justyna Wydrzyńska

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

57% : In 2018, they were anointed the "Abortion Dream Team" by a popular Polish women's magazine, which featured them on the cover wearing T-shirts that read "Abortion Is Okay.
54% : They also provided practical support to women seeking abortions abroad, shared information and resources about the procedure, and held workshops that taught people how to self-manage abortion with pills.
52% : In an age when information and resources about where to get abortion pills and how to use them circulates freely online, it is safer and easier than ever before to self-manage abortion.
51% : "The trial of Justyna has led to more people being supportive of abortion," Jelińska said.
49% : During her own experience with abortion in 2006, Wydrzyńska found that the process of taking the medication was simple but that finding accurate and reliable information was not, and so she launched the site as a place for people to have honest discussions about reproductive health.
48% : In 2019, ADT -- along with Kobiety w Sieci, Women Help Women, Abortion Network Amsterdam, the Berlin-based Ciocia Basia (Aunt Basia), and the UK-based Abortion Support Network -- launched a cross-border network called Abortion Without Borders that helped Polish women travel abroad for abortion care.
47% : Access to abortion is...our work, and we don't want this to be taken from us.
47% : Wydrzyńska, a chemist by training, had spent a decade providing Polish women with information about abortion through the website Kobiety w Sieci (Women on the Net).
47% : Much of their work was dedicated to destigmatizing and normalizing abortion by sharing their own experiences and by traveling the country to collect and publish other people's abortion stories.
44% : The state asked for a sentence of six months of community service, for 25 hours per month.32When it was their turn, the defense spoke about Wydrzyńska's experiences with abortion and domestic violence and how she wanted Ania to have the same opportunity she'd had to assert agency over her life.
43% : The message lacked this radical edge of being unapologetic about it, and we wanted to speak about abortion unapologetically, boldly, and loudly.
43% : To many activists -- in the US and Poland and elsewhere around the world -- helping people access abortion, regardless of what the law says, is a moral responsibility.
42% : In 1945, the law reverted back to its status before the war.7Then in 1956, the Polish parliament amended the law to make abortion available to women who faced "difficult living conditions," without any state intervention or reporting requirements.
42% : As in the US, abortion is a perpetually ongoing debate in Poland -- a heavily Catholic country where recent polls have shown that over two-thirds of the population support the liberalization of abortion laws.
41% : "Abortion was not really spoken about publicly, and the way it was spoken about during the Black Protests was still extremely conservative.
40% : During World War II, when parts of Poland were under the control of Nazi Germany, abortion was liberalized further, made generally legal as part of a broader eugenicist campaign to prevent "defective people" of "inferior stock" -- meaning non-"Aryan" people -- from procreating.
40% : The law provided legal protection to "conceived children" and permitted abortion only in cases of a serious threat to the health and life of the mother, a fetal anomaly, or rape.
39% : In 1932, the country legalized abortion for cases in which the pregnant person's health was threatened and for pregnancies that were the result of rape.
39% : Post-Dobbs, the Alabama attorney general has said that people who help others access abortion could face jail time.
38% : The following year, the Law and Justice Party proposed a law that would have banned abortion altogether and imposed jail time for women who had abortions as well as their doctors.
36% : In Poland, where abortion is illegal with very limited exceptions, aiding an abortion is a crime with a possible prison sentence of up to three years.
36% : "The real story is that this whole construct of how we used to think about abortion -- that we need legal tools to actually provide access -- is false, and it has always been false," Jelińska said.13
35% : The public prosecutor also filed motions against Wydrzyńska, accusing her of "indecent behavior" outside of the courtroom -- including her continued commitment to working with Abortion Without Borders -- that revealed criminal intent.29"I know I would do it again," Wydrzyńska said later.
33% : This came a year after the Soviet Union legalized abortion as part of a pronatalist effort to boost fertility rates and fortify reproductive capacity and in response to concerns about the harm that illegal abortions had on women's health.

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