Poland Loses Abortion Rights Case

The Budapest Times is reporting that Poland lost its case with the woman who sued the country, claiming she was violated in her right to an abortion on grounds of danger to her health.

The reaction to the decision in staunchly Catholic Poland was one of predictable outrage. Member of Parliament Szymon Pawlowski from the conservative League of Polish Families - a nationalist political party which forms part of the current coalition government - said the court’s decision was “embarrassing and scandalous”. His party will ask the Polish government to denounce the European Court of Human Rights, he added. Ewa Kowaleska of the Forum of Polish Women was also highly critical: “The judgement of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has an ideological basis. It is a form of pressure on Poland to consider abortion as a ‘woman’s right’.”

The international women's rights' movement insists on their "reproductive freedom" and despises countries like Poland and Mexico, which have strongly resisted legalizing abortions in their countries. I find the comments of the one dissenting judge in the case very interesting. It points to the strange and perverse logic of reproductive "rights" in relation to the most basic right to live which all human beings possess.

Six of the seven judges supported the ruling. The one dissenting judge, Spaniard Javier Borrego, was extremely critical of the court’s decision: “The Court has ruled that a human being was born as the result of a violation of the European Convention of Human Rights. According to this logic, there is a seven-year-old Polish child whose right to be born contradicts the Convention. I never thought the Convention would go so far and I find it to be terrifying.”