Poland’s lower house, the Sejm, passed two bills easing the country’s abortion law on October 20: 217 votes to 213 to decriminalise helping someone get an abortion, and 233 to 203 to restore terminations on grounds of severe foetal abnormality. Neither margin matters much on its own, because Poland’s constitution gives the president an absolute veto over ordinary legislation unless parliament can muster a three-fifths majority to override it, with at least half the chamber’s 460 members present. That threshold is commonly put at 276 votes. Both bills landed at least 43 votes short of it, which is the number to watch now that President Karol Nawrocki, a conservative aligned with the opposition Law and Justice party, is expected to veto both, as his chief of staff, Marcin Przydacz Bogucki, has signalled: Nawrocki, he said, “supports the protection of life from conception to natural death.”
What the 2020 ruling actually struck down
The bills answer a single ruling. On October 22, 2020, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal found that terminating a pregnancy because of severe and irreversible foetal impairment violated the constitutional right to life. The ruling took effect on January 27, 2021. Before it, Poland performed roughly 1,000 to 1,100 legal abortions a year, and foetal abnormality was the ground for about 98%, 1,050 of 1,076 cases in 2018, so striking that ground did not trim the legal abortion count, it collapsed it: official Health Ministry figures show legal hospital abortions fell from 1,076 in 2020 to 107 in 2021, as reported by Notes from Poland.
The two 2026 bills attack the two halves of that machinery separately. The first amends the penal code to remove the prison term, up to three years, for helping a woman obtain an abortion outside the legal grounds, and for persuading her to do so; it does not touch the grounds themselves. The second reverses the 2020 Tribunal ruling directly, putting foetal abnormality back on the list alongside the two grounds that survived it: a threat to the woman’s life or health, and pregnancy from rape or incest. Both bills now go to the Senate, where Tusk’s coalition holds a bigger majority and can amend but not block them, and then to Nawrocki’s desk.
| Legal hospital abortions (abortions) | |
|---|---|
| 2020 | 1,076 |
| 2021 | 107 |
| 2022 | 160 |
| 2023 | 425 |
| 2024 | 885 |
Source: Polish Health Ministry data, via Notes from Poland and Balkan Insight. Ministry and National Health Fund use different counting methods; activists say the totals likely mix abortions with miscarriages
The 2024 figure of 885, more than five times 2022’s 160, is not new legislation. It follows Health Ministry guidance issued in August 2024 clarifying that the “health” ground makes no distinction between physical and mental health and that a single medical certificate suffices, which activists say let doctors read the existing health exception more broadly, as Balkan Insight reported. Even at 885, the hospital system is a sliver of total demand: the coalition Abortion Without Borders estimates about 120,000 abortions a year in Poland overall, roughly 95% by pills ordered from abroad, about 3% by travel abroad, and fewer than 2% through Polish hospitals. The 2020 ruling did not stop abortion in Poland. It moved nearly all of it outside the medical system, off the books and, mostly, out of the country’s jurisdiction entirely.
The deaths the current law was supposed to prevent
The two grounds that survived the 2020 ruling, life or health risk, were legal the whole time. Human Rights Watch counted at least six women who died since January 2021 after doctors did not terminate their pregnancies despite complications that endangered their health or life, grounds that remained lawful throughout, according to its 2023 report. Prosecutors opened investigations in all six; five were still open as of that report, and the sixth was discontinued without a stated reason.
The best-documented case is Izabela Sajbor, who died of sepsis in September 2021 at 22 weeks’ pregnant, after doctors at a hospital in Pszczyna withheld a termination while the foetus, which scans had shown to have numerous defects, still had a heartbeat. Her family says her heart stopped on the way to the operating theatre. Poland’s National Health Fund fined the hospital 650,000 złoty, about $179,000, for irregularities in her care, and the patients’ rights ombudsman found her rights had been violated. Three doctors were convicted of professional negligence, one additionally of involuntary manslaughter; on appeal, Katowice’s regional court handed down final, unconditional sentences on March 3, 2026, of 18 months with a six-year ban on practising medicine, 15 months with a six-year ban, and one year with a four-year ban, France 24 reported. “It’s an appropriate, fair punishment,” the family’s lawyer, Karolina Kolary, told reporters. The defence has said it will seek cassation at the Supreme Court.
The asymmetry runs the other way for people who help with abortions that are not legal. Justyna Wydrzyńska, co-founder of the Abortion Dream Team, was convicted in March 2023 of helping a woman obtain abortion pills and sentenced to eight months of community service; she is appealing. Doctors who withhold a legal abortion face negligence and manslaughter charges years later, if at all. A woman’s helper, or the woman herself, faces prosecution under a law the two pending bills would only partly unwind, since the second bill restores a termination ground but leaves the underlying criminal framework, and the three-year penalty for terminations outside any legal ground, otherwise in place.
Smaller crowds, same demand
Thousands marched in more than 20 Polish cities, 26 plus a solidarity protest in London by one count, on October 22, the sixth anniversary of the Tribunal ruling, under the slogan “Red Card for Abortion,” Al Jazeera reported. In Warsaw, about 1,000 people gathered outside parliament in the rain, a fraction of the more than 400,000 who turned out nationwide in the week after the original 2020 ruling, by contemporaneous estimates. “Over the last six years, nothing has really changed,” said Emilia Niemiec, 36, who runs the AboTak abortion support centre, in comments carried by Euronews. Organisers had announced actions in 27 localities and said a follow-up protest was planned for the Sunday after.
Zofia Marcinek of the Abortion Dream Team told Euronews the government knew both bills were unlikely to survive a veto and argued it was using them to court female voters ahead of next year’s parliamentary election. The arithmetic supports some version of that scepticism: a coalition that cannot find 276 votes for a bill it controls the agenda for is not close to finding them for an override vote the opposition will not help with. A similar push failed outright in July 2024 when most of coalition partner PSL’s MPs sided with the opposition; this time 14 PSL deputies voted against the fetal-abnormality bill and five against the decriminalisation bill, and 27 MPs, including PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński, simply did not show up.
Leah Hoctor, regional director for Europe at the Center for Reproductive Rights, called the vote “an incremental step forward” and the first movement in parliament in years, but was blunt about its ceiling: “the legal changes that these bills represent are so narrow in scope that for most women who need abortion care, that care will remain illegal,” she told Euronews. Even if both bills survive Nawrocki’s desk, which the vote counts argue against, Poland would remain one of only two EU countries, with Malta, where abortion on request in early pregnancy is not legal. Hoctor’s other figure is the one that frames the whole fight: Poland and the United States are two of only four countries in the past 30 years to have removed a ground for legal abortion from their law, rather than added one. The next number to watch is whichever date Nawrocki’s veto lands on the Senate’s desk, and whether the Senate amends either bill before sending it back to a Sejm that, so far, has not found the votes to matter.