21/02/2021
Euronews, the pan-continental news channel, met up with women’s rights activists who are campaigning for reproductive freedom in a country where a male misogynist government has been trying to clamp down on the freedom of LGBTQ people and trying several means to severely restrict access to abortion for women. Brave activists have been taking to the streets to protest these legal efforts and have taken the fight to the doors of the highly conservative Roman Catholic church in Poland, with direct action and graffiti aimed at the most conservative parishes. One woman explained to reporters that she had had to go to neighbouring Slovakia to access adequate abortion services, and that she was a devout Catholic. She felt that she had done nothing wrong, but that in Poland, there was already such judgement and discrimination against women that she feared for her employment. An ultra-conservative cleric, whose church had been graffitied several times, and who was apopleptic with rage at this, explained that he wanted the government to go further, and ban all abortion, even if the woman died during labour. He made the claim that “ a culture of death is being promoted by atheists”. This remark prompted much hilarity on the atheist internet, with someone commenting, “surely your organization, which has put people to the sword and burned its away across every continent, has a centuries old culture of death that hard nosed atheists could only marvel at”.
