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Poland Pro-Life Leadership Responds to EU Court Forcing Restitution for Denied Abortion

By Hilary White

WARSAW, March 21, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – On March 20, LifeSiteNews.com reported that a woman who had been denied an abortion in Poland had sought and won damages against the Polish government in the European Court of Human Rights.

The decision, say pro-life leaders, is another effort by European ideologues to pressure Poland to admit to the existence of a “right” to abortion.

Ewa Kowalewska, President of the Forum of Polish Women, called the Court’s decision, “the greatest legal curiosum in court history of the European Council.” 

The court ordered the Polish government to pay 36-year-old Alicja Tysiac the equivalent of $38,500 Can., upholding her claim that she had been discriminated against by being refused an abortion by doctors and the Polish courts.

Kowalewska said the Court has effectively declared that “refusal to kill a child breaches provisions of Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.” She called it “a precedent opening doors to deem abortion as a ‘human right’.”

Tysiac claimed, and the Court upheld, that her visual condition was exacerbated by the continuation of pregnancy. Doctors, however, while they declared her “significantly disabled,” concluded that her condition was not serious enough to warrant the death of her unborn child.

Kowalewska said that the decision ignores Polish law and effectively pits the Court of Human Rights against the right to life. In the Tysiac case, no medical specialist, either gynaecologist, or oculist, qualified her state of health for abortion under Polish law.

Poland allows abortion in cases where pregnancy is due to rape; where there is a medical threat to the mother and for eugenic purposes in cases where the child is “severely” disabled.

Tysiac later revealed the broader political motive for her suit at a news conference in Warsaw where she said that abortion should be a woman's choice.

“Every woman should decide herself whether she wants to have the baby or not and the government should not mix into that at all,” Tysiac said.

Her suit claimed the existence of a “right to abortion,” saying that Poland lacked a “procedural and regulatory framework…to enable a pregnant woman to assert her right to a therapeutic abortion, thus rendering that right ineffective.”

Poland has been under heavy pressure from the European Union, the United Nations and various NGO’s to further loosen restrictions on abortion to bring the strongly Catholic and pro-life country more in line with other secularized European countries.

Kowalewska said, “We ask the European Court of Human Rights who is going to assert the rights of the child of Alicja Tysiac, who survived only thanks to the honesty of Polish physicians?”

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
European Court Orders Pro-Life Poland to Compensate Mom Who Was Denied Abortion
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/mar/07032001.html

EU to Force Poland, Malta, Italy to Recognize Gay “Marriages”
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/may/06050204.html

Polish People Support Pro-Life Constitutional Amendment
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/mar/07031207.html

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