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STRASBOURG, November 2, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – The scarcity of doctors willing to commit abortions in Poland has prompted one abortion lobbyist group to turn to the European Court of Human Rights and the leverage created by a case of rape, to try to force the government to loosen the legal restrictions.

The New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights has won a ruling that says the Polish state erred in failing to provide an abortion to a 14 year-old woman who was a victim of rape. The ECHR ruled on October 30th on the notorious P. & S. case that the Polish government had violated Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, prohibiting “inhuman or degrading treatment.” It ruled Poland also violated Articles 8, 5 and 3.

The complainant’s suffering, the court unanimously ruled, was a result of a lack of a “clear legal framework,” for provision of abortion, as well as “procrastination of medical staff and also as a result of harassment.”

“The provisions of the civil law as applied by the Polish courts did not make available a procedural instrument by which a pregnant woman seeking an abortion could fully vindicate her right to respect for her private life,” the court said.

The court has ordered Poland to P. €30,000 and S. €15,000, as well as €16,000 each for legal costs. They had asked for €60,000 and €40,000, respectively.

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The Polish physicians who refused the abortion, the court said, failed to fulfill their legal obligation to refer P. to other physicians who would be willing to carry it out. Moreover, the counseling the complainants received was not “appropriate and objective,” because it only opposed the abortion. “No set procedure was available to them under which they could have their views heard and properly taken into consideration with a modicum of procedural fairness.”

Anthony Ozimic, the communications manager of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, (SPUC), told LifeSiteNews.com that the reality of the case is that it was brought forward, not by an aggrieved mother and a vulnerable young rape victim, but by wealthy, US-based abortion lobbyists as part of an international campaign to litigate away existing abortion restrictions in countries like Poland that do not have an absolute ban.

He said it is becoming common for abortion and euthanasia campaigners to advertise publicly for potential victims to launch court cases intended to drive a wedge deeper into existing legal restrictions abortion and assisted suicide. This case, he said, “is certainly not a genuine call from vulnerable people to have a legal right to abortion. It is being orchestrated by a group of wealthy pro-abortion lawyers.”

The victim’s tragic and horrifying circumstances have raised much media attention for the case. “P.” a fourteen year-old girl from Lublin, a victim of rape in 2008, was pregnant and under pressure from her family to obtain an abortion, which under current Polish law was legal in the circumstances. In the complicated case, abortion advocates and the complainants are accusing pro-life activists of having attempted to lay pressure on the girl not to abort. But the facts of the case remain obscure, with the court’s own documents opening many more questions as to who, exactly, was pressuring whom.

P. and her mother, called “S.” in the court’s documents, had obtained the legal certificate from the office of the public prosecutor for an abortion on the grounds of rape. But when doctors at two Lublin hospitals refused to abort the unborn child, S. contacted a Polish abortion lobbying group, the Warsaw-based Federation for Women and Family Planning (FWFP).

The FWFP immediately offered to help the mother launch a complaint with the ECHR, alleging that her daughter’s human rights had been violated by the failure of the Polish state to force doctors to conduct the abortion.

Adding to the confusion and distress of P., one Lublin hospital, which had refused to abort the child, allowed the case to become public in the media and on the internet by issuing a press release giving information that allowed the girl to be identified. Her mother alleged that after this, P. started being “harassed” by pro-life activists. When P. and S. went to Warsaw to obtain the abortion, they were questioned by police who believed that S. was pressuring her daughter to abort. P. was placed in a government shelter in Gdansk and public authorities started proceedings to have legal custody removed from her mother.

P. was allowed to have the abortion in a Gdansk hospital after her mother asked for an intervention by the Ministry of Health.

Abortion activists around the world are hailing the Poland decision as a victory that could have far-reaching consequences for other countries, such as Ireland, that are still fighting to maintain their abortion restrictions.

“We have reached another milestone in our fight to ensure reproductive rights and access to sexual and reproductive health care for the women of Poland. The court’s judgment illustrates the continued urgency and need for abortion law and policy reform in Poland,” said Krystyna Kacpura, Executive Director of the FWFP.

Johanna Westeson, Regional Director for Europe at the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, with which the FWFP is affiliated and who argued the case before the ECHR, said, “Poland has an extremely restrictive abortion law – way out of line with most other European countries – but allows abortion under certain circumstances, including rape.” Westeson had asked the court for €10,000 in compensation for legal fees.

“In practice, however, it is next to impossible for women to obtain these legal services, and women who attempt to do so are routinely subjected to coercion, humiliation, and harassment—clear violations of their human rights,” she added.

Other intervenors in the case included the Polish Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights who submitted a brief saying that the “denial of timely access to necessary medical treatment for female victims of sexual assault, including legal abortion, exposes them to additional suffering and may constitute an act of inhuman or degrading treatment”. The Polish state, the group said, must “adopt detailed guidelines for the criminal justice system and health-care practitioners” to determine in which circumstances, exactly, the law allows abortion, “in order to prevent additional suffering for the victim”.

The language of the court regarding the lack of a “clear legal framework” will be familiar to those following the results in Ireland’s Parliament of the ECHR’s ruling in the AB and C case. The court issued a similar ruling saying that the Irish government needs to “clarify” the cases in which abortion is legal, a decision that has prompted abortion activists in Parliament to insist on full legalization.

Anthony Ozimic told LSN that the case is part of a greater strategy of the international abortion lobby, originally laid out at the Women Deliver conference in London in 2007.

The Center for Reproductive Rights in New York proposed then that the abortion movement drop all attempts to focus on the issue of the humanity of the unborn child, to disprove the legal personhood of the unborn child.

Instead they said their focus would be on increased litigation against the failure of state services to provide abortions, and thereby the overturning of existing legal restrictions. Ozimic said that the P. and S. case is the “inevitable consequence of exceptions in laws that allow abortion under particular circumstances”.

“If Poland had a total ban on abortion this would not be possible,” he said. “It bodes very ill for countries which have restrictive abortion laws like Poland and Ireland, but don’t have a clear, absolute ban.”

Ozimic noted that with the abortion lobby’s new strategy, no country that does not maintain an outright ban on abortion, having instead opted for compromise legislative “restrictions” can expect to continue to be harassed.

As long as Poland maintains its current compromise, he said, the Center for Reproductive Rights and their national affiliates “will just keep coning back for more as long as those exceptions remain”.

This is the reason SPUC, he said, remains “strongly behind those Polish pro-lifers who believe that the remaining exceptions need to be closed”.

The ruling, moreover, he said, is a “message” to the Irish. The A,B&C case ruling is “of a piece with the overall legal strategy by the abortion movement”.

“It is very important that the Irish authorities realise that there is an attempt by a very wealthy lobby group to impose its abortion ideology upon the Irish people in a way that does violence not only to unborn children to the wording of the Irish Constitution.”