Poland’s parliament has voted to allow abortion in cases of severe foetal defects and to partly decriminalise helping women end their pregnancies illegally, but the legislation is unlikely to meet with the approval of the opposition-aligned President Karol Nawrocki.
A previous attempt to pass such legislation was defeated in July 2024, by 218 votes to 215, after most Polish People’s Party (PSL) MPs joined with the opposition to block it. That prompted Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who leads Poland’s centre-left coalition government, to claim that abortion reform would be impossible during the current parliamentary term.
Though there was some continued opposition within the ruling coalition, this time round the legislative proposals did clear parliament, partly as a result of a lack of a full turnout from the opposition and a greater willingness among the ruling coalition to unite ahead of the 2027 parliamentary elections, in which it hopes to stand on one election slate against the opposition right.
Tusk has also, behind the scenes, been arguing that politically it would be good for the present government to put President Nawrocki on the spot over an issue on which a majority of Polish public opinion backs some liberalisation of abortion legislation, though it does not agree with the favoured Left (Lewica) and Tusk’s Civic Coalition (KO) line of supporting abortion on demand. A survey by the state research centre CBOS in March 2023 found 57 per cent of Poles considered the grounds on which abortion is allowed too narrow, against 13 per cent who backed the law as it stood.
If Nawrocki vetoes the bills passed on October 20, parliament is almost certain to fail to override the presidential veto since the ruling centre-left majority led by Tusk does not have the three-fifths majority required to overturn opposition from the head of state. Both texts go first to the Senate, which can amend or reject them before they reach the president’s desk.
Nawrocki campaigned in the June 2025 presidential election on protecting life from conception to natural death and remains a strong opponent of abortion.
Nawrocki’s top aide Zbigniew Bogucki, who heads the Presidential Chancellery, told commercial broadcaster Polsat News on October 20 that Nawrocki “declared his support for the protection of life from conception to natural death” during the presidential campaign.
“We have a very clear constitutional and legal framework regarding the protection of life. The president ran in the election explicitly stating his support for the protection of life, and he secured the backing of the majority of voters and that has not changed, nor will it change,” Bogucki said.
He also suggested that abortion was now suddenly back on the table because Tusk wants to “rehash ideological issues in order to cover up his incompetence in matters he should actually be dealing with”.
Nawrocki’s press spokesman Rafał Leśkiewicz pointed out that the head of state wanted to concentrate on helping women to enjoy the right conditions to have children.
According to Leśkiewicz, the authorities’ priority should be to ensure appropriate support for women in difficult circumstances and improve the functioning of the healthcare system. He placed particular emphasis on the needs of mothers who give birth to seriously ill children.
“We should take care of women facing this problem. We should support women who give birth to sick children, and we should ensure that the healthcare system provides proper care for mothers who give birth to sick children, rather than debating whether abortion should be permitted up to the 12th week of pregnancy,” he stated.
Even in the unlikely event of both bills becoming law, Poland would remain one of the European Union’s most restrictive countries on abortion.
Poland and Malta are the only EU member states that do not allow abortion on request. Malta permits it only when a woman’s life is at risk or her health is in grave jeopardy, under an amendment passed in 2023.
Most EU countries allow abortion on request until between 10 and 14 weeks of pregnancy, while Sweden allows it up to 18 weeks and France enshrined abortion rights in its constitution in March 2024.
The bill to reinstate abortion as a legal option in cases when prenatal tests indicate the likelihood of severe and irreversible foetal defects or an incurable illness threatening the baby’s life was passed by 233 votes to 203, with one abstention, in the Sejm, the 460-seat lower chamber of the Polish parliament.
The second bill, removing prison sentences of up to three years for helping women to obtain an illegal abortion, including by supplying abortion pills or by carrying out the procedure, was passed by just 217 to 213, with three abstentions. Ten MPs of the centre-right PSL, which is part of the Tusk government, backed it, while 14 voted against and two abstained. It would have been rejected had the main opposition Law and Justice (PiS), which cast 137 votes against, ensured the presence of all of its members. Terminating a pregnancy without the woman’s consent remains a separate criminal offence and is untouched by the bill.
The legislation would protect doctors, nurses and midwives from prosecution when ending a pregnancy to protect a woman’s life or health or because of severe foetal defects. Women who terminate their own pregnancies are already exempt from criminal penalties.
For almost three decades, Poland’s abortion laws were based on a law passed in 1993 which became known as “the abortion compromise”. It allowed abortion to be performed when a pregnancy threatened a woman’s life or health, resulted from a crime such as rape, or involved severe foetal defects.
That legislation was not fully satisfactory for the influential Polish Catholic Church because of the ‘eugenic’ abortion provision to terminate pregnancies of babies which might be born disabled.
In October 2020, the Constitutional Tribunal, dominated by judges elected by the then-ruling PiS, removed the foetal-defect provision, further restricting abortion on the grounds that it violated the right to life provisions contained in the Polish constitution.
Since then, abortion has been legal only when a pregnancy threatens a woman’s life or health, or when it results from a crime, such as rape.
The ruling triggered some of the largest protests the country had seen in decades and a significant fall in opinion poll ratings for the then ruling PiS.
Pro-abortion activists claim that tens of thousands of Polish women each year obtain abortion pills by post or travel abroad to have an abortion.
The deaths of a small number of pregnant women in hospitals since 2021 have fuelled further protests, with critics accusing doctors of delaying treatment for fear of breaking the law.
Prime Minister Tusk’s coalition took power in 2023 promising reforms, but it has remained divided over abortion with the centre-right PSL reluctant to back any significant softening of the legislation.
Instead, Tusk’s Civic Coalition along with their Left allies have taken administrative decisions such as issuing guidance to prosecutors instructing them to “rule in favour of women” and have said that the Constitutional Tribunal’s composition was illegitimate and that its ruling on abortion was therefore invalid.
This has led to instances of terminations as late as the ninth month of pregnancy on grounds of a deformed baby causing mental health problems for the mother.
After one such case in April 2025 at a hospital in Oleśnica, southwest Poland, Catholic nationalist politician Grzegorz Braun MEP entered the maternity ward of the hospital in which the termination took place in order to make a citizen’s arrest of the gynaecologist who performed it, Gizela Jagielska, for what he considered to be the murder of an unborn child. The pregnancy in that case had reached its 37th week.
The attempt to resuscitate abortion as a major political issue ahead of the 2027 parliamentary election will not be welcomed by the political right, with memories of how it hit their poll ratings back in the run-up to the last election.
That several PiS MPs were absent for the vote on decriminalising assistance given to women having abortions is the more striking given that, on October 1, pro-abortion activists installed what they called the world’s first ‘abortomat’ opposite the parliament building in Warsaw — a bank of 22 lockers from which women issued with a PIN code can collect abortion pills.
Had Tusk lost the vote on decriminalisation of assistance for illegal abortions it would have been an embarrassment for him and would have kept the issue out of President Nawrocki’s in-tray too. As it is, the issue will run for a few more weeks creating a little discomfort for both the head of state and the political right.
Tusk can, though, only achieve a pyrrhic victory on this issue, as at the end of the day he just does not have the numbers in parliament to make legislation actually happen, and that may in the end be demobilising rather than motivating for his supporters as the parliamentary elections draw ever closer.
