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Polish women flooded Warsaw's streets on Oct. 3 to protest a proposed abortion ban.

Alexi Witwicki/Kommersant via Getty Images

WARSAW, Poland — It was the first Monday in October, which is to say that it was gray, and gross. So they brought umbrellas.

Not just in Warsaw. In Katowice, Lodz, Gdansk, and Krakow, and tiny villages between. So many thousands of umbrellas, so many very angry women.

“People were just absolutely fucking furious,” Zoska Marcinek said.

It was a kind of anger Marcinek had never seen before, even under Poland’s new right-wing government. A 23-year-old bartender, Marcinek says she’d been a loyal lefty “couch activist,” sticking to the passive engagement of showing up, sometimes, at lectures, debates, or demonstrations. But then the government got serious about changing the country’s abortion law, and Marcinek decided to do what activists had been doing a lot recently: Yelling on the streets. Usually, a good protest got a couple hundred people and lasted an hour or two.

They were hoping for more people given the severity of the bill they were protesting: Poland’s parliament looked ready to approve an abortion ban that threatened doctors — and mothers — with jail time.

The authors of the bill wanted to end what they saw as the loopholes that let women get abortions in just three situations: rape or incest, when the mother’s life is in danger, or when a fetus is diagnosed with a “severe and irreversible impairment” that’s likely to be fatal. Even then, it’s essentially impossible to actually get an abortion in this deeply Catholic country, according to doctors, women’s health advocates, and lawyers, and most women end up going abroad.

It’s not the first time conservatives had tried to push a ban, but this time was different. The far-right Law and Justice party, known by its Polish acronym PiS (“peace”), was single-handedly running the country. It was the first time since the fall of communism, in 1989, that any party had enough support to govern without a coalition. With the power and efficiency of single-party rule, PiS began to dismantle basic institutions: It nationalized the public media, moved to overturn judicial procedures, and expanded secret state surveillance.

But when it came to something as sensitive as changing the abortion law, a democratic imprimatur was important. So conservative groups joined forces, consulted with PiS, and brought the ban to legislators as a “citizens’ initiative” — not the pet project of one parliamentarian but an idea backed by nearly half a million signatures, most of them collected after Sunday mass.

On the day it was introduced, it seemed like a slam dunk. Legislators not only embraced the ban by moving it forward for a vote; they also rejected a more liberal citizens’ initiative, with 200,000 signatures, for unrestricted access to abortion in the first trimester. By rejecting that and then moving forward with the ban, there was no doubt where Parliament stood.

“They’re really concerned about all the issues connected to women’s vaginas.”

Immediately, women started organizing. Facebook invitations moved around like chain letters, linking people who’d never heard of each other in action. No organization coordinated their campaign, and no one knew how many people would join in. They kept it simple: On Monday, Oct. 3, wear black to protest the abortion ban. And, if you could, go on strike. Leave your desk or your classroom or your kitchen and come out in the streets and make some noise.

Veteran protesters hoped they might draw a couple thousand people out on the streets of Warsaw over the course of the day. Government officials scoffed at the idea before it even began. “Let them play,” Poland’s foreign minister said.

Play they did. An estimated 30,000 women flooded the streets of the capital, forcing buses and cars into U-turns. “The whole day, Warsaw was blocked,” remembered Krystyna Kacpura, director of the Federation for Women and Family Planning, a non-governmental organization in Warsaw.

The whole day, it also rained, and the bad weather made the protest iconic: Bird's-eye view photographs show a city utterly overtaken by umbrellas. Social media showed the same scene repeating in city after city — thousands and thousands of women striking in the streets, thousands more, in their offices or homes, wearing black in solidarity. In one way or another, an estimated 6 million people across the country joined the Black Protests.

The crowds took the government by surprise. The next day, Poland’s prime minister distanced the ruling party from the bill, and two days after that, the ban was defeated by a hefty margin.

But this was no single-issue lobbying project. The carefully cultivated abortion ban was simply the most aggressive move in a systematic attack against women’s rights — an attack that’s been in the works for years and that’s become emblematic of Poland’s march ever further right, and ever further away from Europe.

“We won the battle,” said Monika Wielichowska, a Polish parliamentarian who opposed the bill, “but it seems not the war. The war continues.”

Monika Wielichowska, a member of the opposition party Civic Platform, in Parliament.

Anna Liminowicz for BuzzFeed News

If you’re a woman in Poland, the state is coming for you.

That’s how it feels to feminists, anyway. There’s another version of the abortion ban wending through Parliament in a less direct fashion, and there's moves to ban hormonal contraception, which is what most Polish women use. PiS has introduced a bill to make emergency contraception prescription-only, which would essentially make it inaccessible. And conservatives remain committed to ending in vitro fertilization. Marta Szostak, who coordinates a reproductive rights alliance called ASTRA, sums it up simply: “They’re really concerned about all the issues connected to women’s vaginas.”

Where the ban didn’t work, the government is hoping to bribe women out of abortions: In November, Poland passed a bill called For Life that gives 4,000 zloty — roughly $1,000 — to women who choose to keep a risky pregnancy the law would let them end. There is a catch, though: The baby has to be born alive. If it’s stillborn, or if it naturally doesn’t make it to term, there’s no payout. (It also remains unclear exactly where the funds to pay women are coming from.)

The bill was hard to fight. “Saying that people should not receive money if they have a child with disabilities — that’s a difficult position to argue,” said Draginja Nadazdin, country director of Amnesty International.

The new law takes a soft touch to the most heated part of Poland’s abortion debate: whether women should be allowed to abort “imperfect” pregnancies. Abortion opponents call this part of the law the “eugenic exception,” which elicits memories of Poland’s painful past: Eugenics was a pseudoscience, developed in the United States and Great Britain, that supposed a racial hierarchy among the world’s populations. It helped underpin the Nazi belief in “Aryan” superiority, a belief that led to a mass sterilization campaign in the early days of Nazism and, eventually, to the murder of “inferior peoples,” especially Jews, in the Nazi death camps of eastern Poland.

Poles and other Slavic peoples were deemed “inferior” in the Nazi racial hierarchy — and in Nazi reproductive law. In German-occupied Poland, abortion remained off-limits but officials were formally advised to tolerate the procedure.

So for conservative Poles, aborting a fetus because of medical abnormality — even one so serious that the pregnancy is likely to end in miscarriage or the baby is unlikely to live more than a few days — echoes Nazism, a parallel some extreme groups pair with gruesome photos in their anti-abortion campaigns.

Compared to Hitler, almost anything sounds better — especially a government that says it wants to give women money to help with their “undesirable” pregnancies. Women’s activists decided the best approach to the For Life cash payments law was old-fashioned letter-writing. “We wrote a statement and sent it to parliamentarians, but there was no massive opposition in front of the Parliament building,” said Kacpura, from the Federation for Women and Family Planning. “We decided Polish women are clever enough not to agree to this ‘solution.’”

The Polish state’s assault on women’s rights reaches far beyond reproductive health. The ruling party is also dismantling the systems that help victims of domestic violence. In January 2016, only two months after PiS took over the government, the justice ministry cut funding to nonprofit organizations that help domestic violence victims — because, the ministry said, they discriminated against men. “Because the group of victims is narrowed to women only, your offer is [too] limited,” the ministry explained in a letter to one women’s organization obtained by BuzzFeed News.

One group that continued to receive ministry support, on the other hand, is Lex Nostra, a victims’ assistance group whose website makes it sound more like a men’s rights project. Its founder, Maciej Lisowski, has used the site to accuse a 17-year-old gang-rape survivor of making up the charges to get back at her ex-boyfriend and to insist that domestic violence victims invent stories of abuse to get better alimony settlements.

Poland’s ombudsman, who is an independent watchdog, wrote a four-page letter asking the justice ministry for an explanation of the funding cut. The letter pointed out that domestic violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men, according to the country’s own police statistics, and that Poland is bound by a European treaty called the Istanbul Convention, an anti-domestic violence treaty that obligates states to help female victims of family violence.

The ministry was deaf to the first argument. “They just said that help and support should be addressed to every victim of violence or crime. They did not understand that a women’s rights center cannot run a shelter for domestic violence victims that will also receive men,” said Sylwia Spurek, the deputy ombudsman. “It’s irrational.”

Meanwhile, the government is dead set against that treaty. PiS wants to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention; the justice ministry has quietly begun that process, but declined to reply to questions from Spurek’s office about how far along it is. If successful, lawyers say it would mark the first time a European country has withdrawn from a human rights treaty.

Underpinning the ministry’s refusal of funds is a long-brewing battle against the idea of — the very word — “gender.” In Polish, the word sounds strange. “It’s not a word that is even translated,” Spurek said. “We just say ‘gender’ without the English accent.”

It was a word most Poles had never heard before 2012, when the country started debating whether to sign the Istanbul Convention. The word’s literal foreignness made it easy for conservatives to paint gender as an alien idea that would destroy Polish values. “There was a huge discussion … on the conservative side that gender is going to destroy traditional families, that gender means in kindergarten they will tell your boy that he should wear a skirt,” said Agnieszka Wisniewska, editor of the web magazine of the left-leaning institute Krytyka Polityczna. “That’s what they understood as gender: Every boy will wear skirts.”

The word’s literal foreignness made it easy for conservatives to paint gender as an alien idea that would destroy Polish values.

The debate reached a fever pitch in 2015. That’s when three important things happened: Poland ratified the Istanbul Convention. The former government, in what would be one of its final acts, appointed a deputy ombudsman, a lawyer who previously worked as a “gender consultant.” And the whole year long, PiS was campaigning on a nationalist platform that valorized “traditional Polish values.”

Then PiS candidate Andrzej Duda went from dark horse to newly elected president in just three months. One of his first acts in office was vetoing a bill that would’ve made it easier for people to legally change their gender. Duda wasn’t just afraid that boys might decide to wear skirts, creating a “loophole” for same-sex marriage. He was afraid people in skirts might decide to say they were boys, creating “a formal possibility of a man giving birth.”

Two weeks after Duda vetoed the gender bill, PiS swept the parliamentary elections and took single-party control of the government.

Karina Walinowicz and Tymoteusz Zych in the office of Ordo Iuris, an organization which drafted the bill that sought to make abortion a crime.

Anna Liminowicz for BuzzFeed News

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