Women on strike: mobilizing against reproductive injustice in Poland

ABSTRACT

The paper employs a lens of reproductive justice (RJ) to discuss the events of the 2016 mobilization against a total abortion ban proposal in Poland. By presenting the context of women’s rights in Poland, especially the abortion debates, we argue that the 2016 Women’s Strike showed that taking a stand for reproductive justice was countered by governmental actions. By using a case study approach, the paper analyzes the Strike as a tumultuous act of women’s solidarity while simultaneously assessing its implications for RJ issues. We discuss the aftermath and the socio-political reticence to acknowledge the complexities of women’s lives and reproductive choices. Further, we provide arguments for applying the RJ framework into discerning the notion of ideal citizens and gendered social control in Poland. This localized analysis has a global relevance by reflecting the impact of worldwide trends in women’s rights activism and RJ in the context of resurfacing nationalisms and populism.

KEYWORDS:

• Reproductive justice (RJ)
• women’s strike
• abortion
• Poland
• black protest

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Agnieszka Król is a PhD Candidate at Institute of Sociology Jagiellonian University in Poland. She is conducting her doctoral research on reproductive justice and disability. Recently she has co-authored a book on queer kinship in Poland.

Paula Pustułka earned a PhD in Sociology from Bangor University in Wales. She holds a post of Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. She has extensively published on the nexus of gender and migration, focusing particularly on Polish migrant motherhood.

ORCID

Agnieszka Król http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4162-5755

Paula Pustułka http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6679-0365

Notes

1 Triangulation refers to employing more than one approach when investigating a research question. In social research it enhances confidence in the findings (Bryman 2001). Here it concerned consulting an array of sources (e.g. legal documents and their analyses, media communications), and using existing scholarly literature as secondary data.

2 Poland does not recognize civil partnerships nor equal marriage; LGBTIQ rights are limited.

3 The Polish communist state existed from 1944 to 1989. The Polish People’s Republic was regarded as a satellite state of the Soviet Union.

4 All translations done by the authors.

5 Young women are a prominent group in Poland’s mass intra-European migration. During the Black Protests, they voiced concerns about becoming subject to the proposed law on their potential return to Poland.

6 The Solidarity movement was the 1980s anti-communist opposition emergent from workers’ protests. It used non-violent civil resistance to advance the transition to democracy, gathering 10 million participants.

7 The events of Gdańsk 1980 were crucial for the emergence of Solidarity Movement in Poland.

8 Istanbul Convention is the 2011 Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence.

9 The voices of queer feminists and lesbian mothers were silenced in the mainstream conversations, although both groups remain significant in the activist scene, especially in recent years (Mizielińska, Struzik, and Król 2017).