https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2308-5329
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ABSTRACT
In this paper we explore how young Polish Catholic mothers navigate the dominant discourses on abortion in light of the recent tightening of legislation in Poland. We draw on theoretical considerations about the relationships between norms, subjectivity, agency and resistance and propose ‘maternal knowledge’ as a central concept for our analysis. Our data consists of twenty-eight in-depth interviews conducted with mothers who self-identify as Catholics. We demonstrate how individual women engage with the three authoritative knowledges on abortion, namely the legal framework, the teaching of the Catholic Church and the medical knowledge, and accept, reject or revise their main premises by mobilising the lived maternal knowledge. The results of our analysis challenge the widely shared identification of the Catholic faith with the ‘pro-life’ orientation and reveal the complexities and contradictions of individual stances, which are often inconsistent with the official teaching of the Church.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Reliance on survey data regarding abortion attitudes is problematic for several reasons (Jagannathan Citation2001). In recent opinion polls on abortion conducted on Polish representative samples, the phrasing of the questions used in the questionnaires seemed to be one of the most important factors determining responses (Chrzczonowicz Citation2020).
2. Following Jordan, we define authoritative knowledge as ‘the knowledge that participants agree counts in a particular situation, that they see as consequential, on the basis of which they make decisions and provide justifications for courses of action. It is the knowledge that within a community is considered legitimate, consequential, official, worthy of discussion, and appropriate for justifying particular actions by people engaged in accomplishing the tasks at hand’. (Jordan Citation1997, 58).
3. In 2020, 53% of 25–34 year-old Polish women had a tertiary qualification (OECD Citation2021).
4. According to opinion polls, women with higher levels of education and those from larger cities have a more liberal approach to abortion (CBOS Citation2020, 6). This trend, however, has not been reflected in our sample. While many Catholic mothers from rural areas and those with lower levels of education were openly opposed to tightening the abortion law, well-educated Catholics from large cities were more cautious. Some of them considered abortion permissible only in the case of there being a serious risk to the woman’s life.