The Back-and-Forth of Abortion Debates in Poland.

Towards a Historical Understanding of the Misrecognition Gambit of the National Catholic Right

Abstract

This article describes the back-and-forth pushes and pulls of abortion law in Poland based on insights into the power structures of political participation and exclusion. This narrative is guided by Nancy Fraser’s theory of justice, which focuses on the set-up of the political stage that impacts how abortion is legally regulated and culturally interpreted. By arguing that the legal accessibility of abortion (or the lack thereof) is not an epiphenomenon of cultural identity, this historical overview considers the topic of abortion as ammunition to gain political power. To explain this, we introduce two notions – the zero-sum game and the misrecognition gambit – to demarcate the shifts in political organizing between women’s mobilizations, the Catholic Church, and the communist rule. The analysis portrays how the communist
rule leveraged the topic of abortion into a powerful political weapon that strongly symbolized anti-communist opposition. The zero-sum game marks the period of the flourishing of conservative forces under democracy, leading to a period of defeat on the side of women’s organizing. However, once
the state-church alliance decided to gamble again on further restricting access to abortion after 2015, the gambit forcefully backfired-resulting in the largest anti-state and anti-Church mobilizations since the communist rule in Poland.