Pro-abortion activists in Poland have launched what they claim to be the world’s first delivery locker that provides women with abortion pills, the access to which is normally restricted.
The abortomat automatic locker was placed on October 1 opposite the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament, in the capital Warsaw, an action which is seen as an act of defiance by the pro-abortion lobby in a country which has effectively banned abortion in all but a very limited number of cases.
The machine has been launched by the Women Help Women (WHW) global organisation that provides “self-managed abortion” and the Polish activist group Abortion Dream Team (ADT).
The activists assure that the abortomat “is completely real rather than an artistic performance” and consists of 22 numbered lockers which can be opened through a digital keypad.
Women seeking abortion will be given a six-digit PIN code that opens one of the doors in which they will find a package containing the pills which they may take at home or use on the premises of the ADT where the locker is located. No personal details are recorded, the organisers said.
The site of the locker is also the seat of the ADT which in March 2025 set up Poland’s first “abortion clinic” at which women may seek advice on obtaining an abortion.
The delivery mechanism for the abortion pills is important given Poland’s restrictions against abortion.
Abortions currently are allowed only if the pregnancy is a result of a crime such as rape or incest or if the mother’s life or health is under threat.
The number of legal abortions is therefore low in Poland, with only 851 taking place in the country during 2025. Council of Europe figures put the 2024 total at 890, double the 425 recorded in 2023.
The legislation makes it illegal for any individual person to assist with an unauthorised abortion but women who perform self-abortions via the use of pills are not liable for prosecution, therefore the use of these pills is not illegal, even if the pills are not available on the Polish market.
Since the abortomat is not a human being but a machine and the person collecting the pills, in accordance with the regulations, is not breaking the law, people using the machine are not liable to prosecution.
According to ADT “the abortomat transforms a closely guarded, criminalised procedure into something as simple as picking up a package. A door that opens when all others have slammed shut.”
WHW director Kinga Jelińska compared the machine to online retail, asking why cosmetics could be delivered within a day when abortion pills could not.
The activists argue that the machine is intended for women who have an urgent medical need that means they cannot wait for the several days it takes to deliver pills by post.
Activist groups such as WHW and ADT say that they help tens of thousands of women in Poland obtain abortions each year through means such as by providing pills.
But to do that in person makes activists liable to prosecution which could result in a prison sentence of up to three years under Article 152 of the Polish Criminal Code. The activists believe that the abortomat will protect them from that fate.
In reality it is the present centre-left government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk which is protecting and emboldening the activists in their actions through instructing prosecutors and doctors to tolerate abortion and to give women the benefit of the doubt in legal grey areas.
Since coming to office in 2023 the ruling majority has been unable to change the legislation because of resistance from one of the coalition parties, the centre-right Polish People’s Party (PSL) and the power of veto of the conservative-leaning presidents Andrzej Duda and now Karol Nawrocki.
Though in order to deliver on one of its election promises the Tusk Government has made administrative moves to bypass the abortion law.
The legislation on abortion was further tightened in 2020 when the Constitutional Tribunal ruled that “eugenic” abortions, [abortions that are carried out when doctors determine that the foetus is damaged – ed.] are illegal. The judgment was published, and so took effect, on January 27, 2021.
Tusk admits that the abortion law as it currently stands cannot be changed because he hasn’t got support for amending it in parliament, but his government has instead issued guidelines on when and how abortions can be carried out instructing both doctors and prosecutors to “take the women’s side” when adjudicating on the matter.
These guidelines were issued by the health ministry on August 30, 2024, together with the prosecutor general’s office, leaving doctors to define the meaning of the term “threat to life and health” despite the fact that the Polish Criminal Code clearly defines what the threat to life means and imposes financial and prison sanctions against those who threaten a child’s life. They are interpretative and do not bind the courts; under them a single psychiatric opinion is enough to establish grounds for a termination.
Pro-life campaigners and the conservative legal think tank Ordo Iuris believe that the government’s guidelines which state that there is no specific time limit on when a pregnancy may be terminated if the life or health of the woman is at risk have opened the door to abortion on demand.
According to Ordo Iuris “the government guidelines allow for the possibility of taking the life of a child in the prenatal stage of development, when the child already enjoys full protection of life under Polish criminal law, and when it is possible to resolve the conflict between the life of the unborn child and the life or health of the pregnant woman by preserving both conflicting legally protected interests.”
The consequences of this legal interpretation led to the abortion of a child in the 36th week of pregnancy that was performed in Oleśnica, Lower Silesia, southwest Poland, on the grounds of a threat to a woman’s mental health, carried out despite the doctors’ earlier proposal to end the pregnancy immediately by caesarean section without killing the child, precisely because of the mother’s poor mental state.
The case led Grzegorz Braun, the MEP who leads the Catholic nationalist Confederation of the Polish Crown, who stood in the presidential election in 2025 polling 6.34 per cent of the vote, to attempt a citizen’s arrest of the doctor who carried out the abortion. He entered the Oleśnica hospital on April 16, 2025 and prosecutors opened an investigation into the unlawful detention of the gynaecologist.
Abortion was relatively freely available in Poland during the days of communist rule (1944-1989) to the chagrin of the powerful Polish Catholic Church in a society in which the vast majority of people described themselves as Catholics.
After communism ended and Polish democracy and sovereignty was restored a heated debate about what should be done about abortion ensued which ended in the early 1990s in legislation which restricted it to cases when a woman’s life or health were in danger, then the pregnancy was the result of a crime and when there was serious damage to the foetus. That law, the Family Planning Act, was passed in 1993.
That was a compromise between the view of the Catholic Church that abortion should be outlawed totally because it is a form of killing and the view that abortion should be about women’s choice.
The compromise lasted until 2020 when the Constitutional Tribunal, in which the Conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) managed to secure a majority, decided that the provision of the abortion law that allowed abortion on the grounds of damage to the foetus should be discontinued.
That decision led to some of the biggest protests seen in modern day Poland with mass demonstrations in dozens of Polish cities and to a significant fall in the support for PiS in opinion polls.
PiS lost close to 10 per cent in opinion surveys and never fully recovered that support right up to the parliamentary election in 2023 in which PiS lost its majority and power fell into the hands of the current centre-left majority led by Tusk.
Given the fact that PiS’s candidate Karol Nawrocki won the presidency in June 2025 and that the ruling Tusk coalition does not have the three-fifths majority required to overturn presidential vetoes there seems little or no chance for the abortion law to be changed.
PiS and other right-wing parties have made it clear that if they regain power in the parliamentary election due in 2027 they will cancel the present government’s regulation on abortion and return to what they argue is an interpretation that is faithful to the law which protects the unborn child.
