“Polish authorities are using their powers to terrorize people instead of to protect basic rights,” said one researcher.


Polish scientists have developed lab tests that can detect if a person has taken abortion pills and are reportedly using the tests to investigate pregnancy outcomes in the country, according to a chilling article published by The New York Times last week.

Nearly three years ago, Poland’s right-wing government instituted a near-total ban on abortion. Since then, Polish officials have increasingly opened investigations into people seeking medical care for miscarriages. While Polish law does not criminalize having an abortion, the government can prosecute family, friends and health care professionals who provide or assist in abortions.

“Polish authorities’ ruthless pursuit of people trying to get or provide basic health care can only be described as a witch hunt,” Hillary Margolis, senior women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “The government is misusing police and courts to advance its anti-rights agenda, taking its abusive policies into private homes, hospital rooms, and doctors’ offices.”

The Polish government has forcefully repressed the reproductive rights movement in the country, violently cracking down on demonstrations, threatening activists with prison time and ordering doctors to record all pregnancies in a national database.

Beyond ramping up surveillance of people suspected of terminating their pregnancies, Polish authorities have funded the development of tests that can determine whether a person has used mifepristone and misoprostol, the drugs typically used in a medication abortion. In rare cases, these tests have been used in prosecutions.

“By going after women and girls who need medical care — and doctors who provide it — Polish authorities are using their powers to terrorize people instead of to protect basic rights,” Margolis said. “As the government ramps up its targeting and harassment of people allegedly linked to abortion, anyone can fall prey to these attempts and have their privacy, dignity, and right to health violated.”

Reproductive rights activists in the U.S. should prepare for the possibility of such technology being adapted in states with abortion bans, wrote Patrick Adams, author of the Times article.

“Testing for abortion drugs is just the latest effort by the Polish government to enforce a stringent law,” he said. “It’s a perversion of science for political ends and a possible preview of what awaits us in America’s post-Roe future.”

In response to draconian bans and restrictions on abortion access, people in both Poland and the U.S. have increasingly relied on informal networks for access to pills to self-manage abortions. Even before Roe v. Wade was overturned in the U.S., thousands of people faced criminalization for pregnancy outcomes, including self-managed abortions, according to Pregnancy Justice.

Currently, abortion pills are banned or restricted in more than two dozen U.S. states — and if U.S. lawmakers move to develop lab tests that can detect whether a person has taken abortion pills in the future, there will be dire consequences for people who live in states where abortion is criminalized. Right-wing lawmakers in the U.S. have already introduced bills that would classify abortion as homicide, and a growing number of anti-abortionists have called for the death penalty for people who have had abortions.

“The abortion rights movement has experienced incredible amounts of surveillance to date, and we’re going to see an expansion of those tools that have already existed, and more of law enforcement using often illegal means to spy on or prosecute people, without Roe,” Rafa Kidvai, director of If/When/How’s Repro Legal Defense Fund (RLDF), told Jezebel.


  • Norgur@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I don’t get this whole push against abortion. I mean, you can be against abortion… but people seem to feel so strongly about this that they are happily willing to sacrifice doctor-patient-confidentiality, risk dead women and whatnot. I… I just don’t get it. There are so many issues on this world that should trigger all the same impulses but don’t get responses nearly as strong.

    Be it child abuse, child soldiers, child murders, child sexual abuse, whatever… yet, somehow living children that can really feel shit aren’t as important to protect as lumps of cells that can’t feel shit yet because they have about 7 brain cells none of which is working yet…

    • anteaters@feddit.de
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      They don’t give a shit about any form of children or cells, this is about holding power over women and forcing them to become mothers.

      • deafboy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The breeding fetish is more of a western libertarian kink.

        I really do believe that pro-lifers in europe wants to help. Unfortunately, people who wish to help you are often worse enemies that those who wish to harm you.

      • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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        I don’t think this is really true, in most cases.

        I mean my mother would be staunchly “pro-life” but not for this reason.

        • can@sh.itjust.works
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          Are you sure? Maybe her position was swayed in that direction by those in power who do feel that way.

    • PuppyOSAndCoffee@lemmy.ml
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      Yeah. In the US, the same ppl that say “you can’t tell me what to do with my guns” are often the first to say “you can’t do that to your body”.

      what is interesting is the anti abortion starts from a place of love, as a personal choice, and then spills quite quickly into a structure for control, a place intolerant and quite unloving.

      I am not sure of the mechanisms that do this, nor why it is done.

      I get having tests, in the ER that could be helpful (I imagine) but I don’t get why it is important outside of that scenario.

    • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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      Amongst people that married their high school sweetheart and endured the hardships of a boring life in suburbia, abortion is seen as a kind of cheat.

      They feel as though there should be some kind of punishment or consequences for partying away your 20s. If you have sex out of wedlock then you should bear the risk of having to raise a child as a single parent and have to endure the shame associated with that.

      One of the basic tenets of morality as taught by Christianity, or boomer working-class polite society, is that immoral behaviour has shameful consequences. The “wages of sin”, “you reap what you sow”, et cetera.

      Basically, people feel like only harlots need abortions, and harlots should be punished.

      • fred-kowalski@artemis.camp
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        Many good points here. While many boomers are conservative, conservatives are less and less boomers as they doddle off to the old folks home. At some point, blaming the olds is just a distraction.

      • chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org
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        … does Poland even have suburbs? Eurostat suggests that it’s almost entirely split between cities and rural areas.

        By the way… WOW I love the Eurostat website. Those maniacs in Brussels have done it again!

    • willeypete23@reddthat.com
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      Read The birth dearth or listen to the video by Jane Elliot.

      It’s racism.

      In their eyes, Minorities tend to be poor and couldn’t access abortions if they were legal, but white women? They can. And they want white babies, to increase the white population. But those pesky white women can afford abortions.

      • Norgur@kbin.social
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        That’s a two part issue: you can be for abortion. If that should have any consequences is something else. You can he for the legalisation of murder, but murder should not be legal.

        • artaxthehappyhorse@lemmy.ml
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          I edited my post because the last bit was counter productive. Most people are not against abortion in theory. They are socially engineered into supporting shit like abortion bans. Much of the world has fallen into authoritarian “order”. There will be an eventual fall of that order, even if it takes several hundred years. Maybe it won’t though. Maybe the order only lasts 10 more years, who knows.

    • HumanPenguin@feddit.uk
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      OI disagree with them very strongly.

      But if like many anti abortion folks. You trully believe life starts at conception. And God is directly involved in deciding if a person get pregnant.

      While is think you are stupid and irrational.

      The idea of valuing the mother over the baby. Or refusing to value the mother right to freedom over the living child’s right to live.

      Sorta makes a sick sense. I’d say if folks trully believe these things. Its more questionable if they don’t want to ban abortion.

    • rgb3x3@beehaw.org
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      They lost the war, but then they dispersed around the world and have been plotting revenge ever since. They’re participating in a slow-burn takeover of governments instead of outright war, which they know they’d lose.

      • ElZoido@kbin.social
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        They didn’t need to disperse around the world. Every country had their own homebrewn flavour of Nazis. It’s just that during and shortly after the war they kept quiet, because they new they would be unpopular due to the association. Now that their aren’t many people left who have experienced the atrocities first hand and most people have become indifferent to the Nazis, they just started to become more public.

        • DieterParker@feddit.de
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          Sadly they even gain traction again in germany now. Our current far right party afd currently is all over the news as second strongest party in multiple eastern states according to public surveys.

    • kromem@lemmy.world
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      Not yet.

      Though I think the up and coming Nazis are going to be in for a surprise with what’s coming over the next few years with the prisoner’s dilemma of AI advancement.

      Nazism is many things. Superintelligent isn’t one of them.

      In general, if crappy people had more brain cells they’d be scared as shit with the implications of decades of large data plus exponential capacity for processing it in the next few years. But then again, if they had more brain cells maybe they wouldn’t be such crappy people.

    • Damage@feddit.it
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      You know when the good guy in movies says “you can kill me, but you can’t kill an idea!”.

      Well it works with assholes as well.

      • ExLisper@linux.community
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        The thing is most news from Poland are in Polish. It’s rarely talked about in international press and when it is it’s usually not good news.

        • HumanPenguin@feddit.uk
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          Posting the site plus a Google translate link. Would be helpful.

          No relationship to Poland. But in genral I’d love to see more international news posted based on the views from the nation. Rather then just what UK or US news sources think will be popular for advertising.

          • ExLisper@linux.community
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            The truth is that journalism in Poland sucks. It’s mostly very biased and full of shit content. Not worth following. It’s much better in Spain but I mostly follow local news. I might look for something in English worth sharing.