‘Skirting heaven, skirting hell’: the maternal perspective of Catholic women on abortion and the recent restrictions in abortion law in Poland

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Abortion
• reproductive rights
• religion
• Catholicism
• Catholic church
• maternal knowledge

Introduction

In this paper, we explore how young Polish Catholic mothers navigate the dominant discourses on reproductive rights, with a particular focus on abortion. The discussion presented here is based on data collected in the months following the further tightening of the already severe abortion law which came into effect in early 2021. After this amendment, abortion in cases where prenatal tests indicate a high probability of severe and irreversible impairment of the foetus or an incurable life-threatening disease is no longer legal in Poland. The change provoked fierce public resistance and a wave of explicitly anti-government and anti-Church protests of an unprecedented scale in post-communist Poland (Motak, Krotofil, and Wójciak 2021). In line with the idea that abortion became ‘the issue that defines Catholicism today’ (Miller 2014, xvii), these events provided a unique opportunity to study the views on abortion expressed by Polish women who are mothers and identify as Catholics. Bringing sharply to the fore the historicity of reproductive ethics and deepening the split between the embattled opinions, the recent change in legislation constitutes the immediate backdrop for our analysis.

Although over 90% of Poles declare their affiliation with the Catholic Church (GUS 2019, 34), all available recent survey data indicates that the current legislation or any further tightening of abortion regulations are supported by no more than 20–22% of the respondents (CBOS 2020; Chrzczonowicz 2020).¹ These survey findings, however, do not tell us much about the factors shaping the individual attitudes towards abortion, for example, we know very little about the role of religion or the experiences of mothering in this context. Hitherto, studies that explore individual resistance to dominant discourses have focused mainly on women who have had abortions (Lie, Robson, and May 2008). While the attitudes and discourses produced by reproductive rights activists have been studied in various national contexts (for example, O’Shaughnessy 2021; Lowe and Page 2019; Kościańska, Kosiorowska, and Pomian 2021), the narratives of women who do not engage in activism and do not have direct experience of abortion have attracted less attention so far. We aim to fill these gaps and shed some light on how ambivalent and often contradictory orientations, which may appear deficient or misguided from a perspective of a Catholic ideal, are constructed, negotiated and maintained by young Catholic mothers.

The data presented here pivots away from the identification of the commitment to Catholic faith with the ‘pro-life’ camp. We argue that this framing is far removed from the lived realities of Catholics in Poland. As Patricia Miller observed in the American context, ‘good Catholics can support abortion rights’ (Miller 2014, xxii). The overemphasis on Catholic affiliation as a main motivation for anti-abortion attitudes unwittingly privileges and reproduces the institutional aspirations of the Catholic Church to cast its teaching as the supreme guideline in the field of human reproduction.

In the analysis presented below, we draw on theoretical considerations on the relationships between norms, subjectivity, agency and resistance. We focus on the agentic engagement with the norms regarding abortion, facilitated by the foregrounding of the maternal knowledge. We define agency as ‘the capacity for autonomous action in the face of often overwhelming cultural sanctions and structural inequalities’ (McNay 2000, 10). For the purpose of our analysis, we limit our attention to one kind of cultural sanctions, namely the ‘authoritative knowledges²’ (Jordan 1997) about pregnancy and abortion operating in the Polish socio-cultural context. These include the framings expressed in abortion law, the teaching of the Catholic Church and medical knowledge.

The focus on agency does not imply that the states of being acted upon are scarce or non-existent. As Butler notes, ‘[the fact] that norms act upon us implies that we are susceptible to their action, vulnerable to a certain name-calling from the start’ (Butler 2014, 7). Given the exposure to and receptivity of norms consistent with Catholic teaching on abortion among our participants, facilitated by early religious socialisation and the high level of medicalisation of reproduction, we ask how and when the norms are refused or revised. We are particularly interested in the process of resignification, allowing the subjects produced in and through discourse to articulate words in such a way that they give them new meaning (Butler 1990, 1997a, 1997b). This idea extends the notion of agency beyond the subordination/subversion dichotomy and locates agency also in the self-authoring process of becoming a willing subject of a given discourse (Butler 1990). This seems particularly apt for the analysis of very diverse attitudes towards abortion reflected in our data, which go beyond the ‘subordinated and lacking agency’ vs ‘subversive and agentic’ polarisation and construct, reproduce and legitimise maternal knowledge. We place our analysis of the participant’s responses firmly in the context of an act (Clare 2009), namely the history of abortion struggles in Poland and the recent change of legislation.

The history of reproductive rights in Poland

The social norms regarding abortion in Poland have been strongly influenced by the Catholic Church. Under state socialism, abortion for medical and socio-economic reasons, up to fourteen weeks of pregnancy, was legal and accessible free of charge; the Polish state also subsidised bio-medical contraception methods (Fuszara 1991). Access to reproductive health services was dramatically reduced at the beginning of political transformation after 1989. At the time, the Church became closely linked with the political opposition and secured support from new political elites. The Church was able to effectively maintain its influence for the following decades by orchestrating the provision of religious instruction in public schools and controlling significant proportion of media outlets (Topidi 2019). Currently, the Catholic teaching on reproductive practices, including contraception and abortion, is also transmitted in public schools through a non-compulsory subject ‘family life education’ which is often taught by catechists.

Immediately after the political transformation, reproductive rights became a highly politicised issue (Żuk and Żuk 2017). The Polish episcopate, as Joanna Mishtal notes, ‘saw abortion as symbolic of society’s secularisation and the limited influence of the church during the previous decades; therefore, discussions about the proposed resolution to ban abortion became the means of re-establishing the Church’s power’ (Mishtal 2015, 41). In 1990, an executive order was implemented requiring women seeking abortion to get a positive opinion from two gynaecologists, a physician and a psychologist (Dz. U. 1990, 29/178). Further restrictions were instituted through the introduction of religious bioethics into ethical decision making in medicine, with Catholic clergy taking key positions on committees linked to state agencies. The medical establishment implemented the conscience clause (Lekarz 1991, December 14), which resulted in refusals of the provision of services for women seeking the termination of pregnancy, the prescription of contraceptives or emergency contraceptives. Although the clause was to be used by individual doctors in specific cases, it became ‘a tool of denying care on a more systemic scale’ (Mishtal 2015, 47). The near-total abortion ban, which became to be known as ‘the abortion compromise’, was introduced in 1993 (Dz. U. 1993, 17/78) and was considered by many a significant victory of the Church (Mandes and Rogaczewska 2013). The most recent tightening of the abortion law in 2021 (Dz. U. 2021, 175) has also been celebrated as by some hierarchs and pro-life activists as yet another triumph (Motak, Krotofil, and Wójciak 2021). Through these historical struggles, three authoritative knowledges on abortion gained ascendance and legitimacy: legal framings, the teaching of the Catholic Church and medical knowledge. The data presented below demonstrates how individual women engage with these knowledges’ main premises and accept, reject or revise them on the basis of their maternal knowledge.

Materials and methods

The findings are based on in-depth interviews conducted between January and August 2021 with twenty-eight women. All interviews were voice recorded and transcribed. We removed all identifiable data from the transcriptions and substituted participants’ names with pseudonyms. The study was reviewed by the Jagiellonian University’s Ethics Committee (221.0032.4.2021), all respondents provided informed consent to participate. Data collection and analysis were approached iteratively – we developed a topic guide based on a literature review and modified it in the course of data collection as new questions emerged from the analysis. At the later stages of data collection, where possible, we re-interviewed our early respondents to elicit their responses to additional questions.

All women in our sample were young mothers, in other words, they took care of young children and their oldest child was no older than five years. We used a combination of convenience and purposive sampling methods; information about the study was distributed in groups for Catholic mothers; snowballing and the personal networks of the research team were also used in the recruitment. Although we attempted to achieve diversity in terms of demographic characteristics, three-quarters of our respondents had tertiary (bachelors and masters degree) education which constitutes an overrepresentation.³ Fourteen respondents lived in large cities (above 100,000 inhabitants), two lived in small towns and the remaining twelve lived in rural areas. Our participants were between 22 and 40 years old (the mean age was 30.5 years). Most of the women in our sample were married, two participants were single, and one was engaged at the time of data collection. They had not been partaking in any activist groups focusing on reproductive rights and none of them had joined the Women’s Strike protests. All participants self-identified as Catholics. For the purpose of delineating our sample, we approached ‘being a Catholic’ as something that a person can actively choose to do, as opposed to an essentialised, external identity. The women in our interviews navigate different views on what it means to be Catholic or live their life as a Catholic. Their interpretations of ‘doing Catholicism’ vary considerably, both in general terms, and in the context of bearing and raising children; however, all place a relatively strong emphasis on the religious practice and the cultivation and transmission of moral dispositions perceived as Catholic.

Three of the authors read the interview transcripts multiple times before inductively identifying descriptive and analytic codes (for example, ‘killing of a child’; ‘maternal body’) to organise the data. Then, through the process of constant comparison, we developed (and modified) categories that contained related codes, their properties and the relationships between them (Glaser and Strauss 1967). We used MAXQDA2020 software to facilitate this process (VERBI Software 2019). The final outcome was discussed with the fourth author and checked for coherence and fit between the data and the secondary narrative.

Results

All but one of the women in our sample thought that abortion might be an acceptable course of action in some circumstances; the specifics varied greatly between respondents.⁴ The diversity of responses brings to the fore the delegitimisation of the views of non-radicals (those who do not position themselves either in the pro-choice, or anti-abortion ‘camps’) in the polarised public discourses. For those who identify as Catholics, yet do not support the complete ban on abortion, maintaining the middle ground and escaping the demand to be intelligible and coherent subject (see Butler 1997a) is a difficult task. It often leads to intentional withdrawal from articulating these views, and prevents their full formation in cohesive narratives. This is particularly visible in the emergent, non-rehearsed character of the narratives we collected. The analysis of these narratives reveals, however, that despite the diversity of their stances, Catholic mothers give priority to maternal knowledge, recognise it as legitimate and re-interpret dominant discourses on abortion through the maternal lens.

The views on pregnancy and abortion expressed during the interviews drew heavily on three systems of authoritative knowledge about human reproduction (Jordan 1997), namely the legal system, medical knowledge and the Catholic teaching on pregnancy and women’s bodies. In our respondents’ narratives, the three knowledges representing the legitimate framings of conceiving, gestating and delivering children were variously reinforced, appropriated or contested by maternal knowledge giving priority to unique, personal life experiences. In the following sections, we discuss in more detail how young mothers engaged with the authoritative knowledges from their maternal perspective.

Legal authority

None of the women participating in our study objected to the general principle of state regulating the pregnant body. Our respondents shared the implicit view that abortion should be governed through law, in line with Epstein's observation that people with divergent world views share the belief that norms should be legally enforced (Epstein 1997). Some women stated that they supported ‘the abortion compromise’, a legislation which restricted access to legal abortions to three exceptional conditions: the pregnancy being a consequence of incest or rape; the pregnancy posing a serious risk to a woman’s life or health; in cases of severe and irreversible handicap or an untreatable life-threatening disease of the foetus. The historicity of the reproductive rights struggles was largely unrecognised. For our respondents, the ‘abortion compromise’ has been in operation for their entire adult life and constituted the status quo often associated with having a choice in difficult circumstances. At the same time, the narratives reveal the insufficiency of the choices afforded by this law. Most of the women, including those who explicitly affirmed the ‘compromise’, enacted different forms of resistance to this legislation and its recent modification. One form of resistance was expressed through ignorance of the law and the refusal to acknowledge the rules. The categorisations of acceptable/unacceptable reasons for abortion expressed by our respondents loosely referenced legal discourses, but many women were unable to recall all conditions allowing legal abortion and lacked a clear understanding of the recent ruling by the Constitutional Tribunal and consequent restrictions. This inability or refusal to cite the legislation can be illuminated by the notion of performativity which allows for theorising disobedience, resistance, and non-conformity enacted during the reiteration (see Butler 1997a). The meanings of the words were changed during attempts to quote the rules; some women produced their own interpretations of the legal constrains, for example, what the pregnant women’s health being at risk actually means. Hanna defined the risk in a very narrow way and limited the conditions posing a threat to the mother’s health to ectopic pregnancy or the nesting of the foetus within scar tissue of the uterus. She argued that the latter situation can be safely managed with appropriate care and is therefore not an ‘objective’ threat:

[…] there is no such condition that we could call ‘a pregnancy posing a threat to mother’s health’ which the doctors would not be able to tackle. I know a few cases when pregnancy, or rather the position of the placenta, not the pregnancy itself, can be a threat to the mother. It is, for example, the nesting of the foetus in the C-section scar on the uterus […] and here the decision to continue with the pregnancy is possible and a woman should be supported in that.

Conversely, Marta’s interpretation of the ‘risk to woman’s health’ was much broader and included a situation when a mother who already has many children gets pregnant again and ‘struggles to cope psychologically’. She argued that ‘psychological health’ should also be taken into account by the law. Hanna’s personal experience of a C-section and Marta’s maternal knowledge on the struggles involved in caring for children came to the fore in their narratives.

The resistance towards the legal authority was not limited to resignification. Many women were able to overtly reject the existing law regulating abortion upon hearing the details cited by the researcher during the interviews. The rejection of the applicability of general rules to particular life situations was enacted by both the women who thought that the legislation was too strict, and those who thought it was too liberal. Beata, for example, highlighted the significance of maternal knowledge in the process of setting rules and delegitimised the law as having been created by men who did not have children and did not understand the complexity of the circumstances faced by some women:

There are different situations and if we have a particular situation, why should a woman, who is directly affected by it, not be able to make a decision? Why is this decision made by a man from the government who knows better? In truth, what does he know, if he never had any children, has never encountered such a situation?’ (Beata)

Most women judged the rules regarding abortion on the basis of their perceived ‘legitimacy’, not their ‘legality’ (Brunnée and Toope 2010). The legitimacy was constructed by the application of maternal knowledge with numerous references to the personal stories of women from close social circles – family members or friends – who had faced difficult choices. Ewa, when asked what shaped her attitude towards abortion, said: ‘[…] I know this girl, she had been through a lot. She was raped and unfortunately she had to have the abortion’. Similarly, Dorota talked about the personal ordeal of other women she knew:

I know some women who have one child, they had miscarriages and decided that there were no other options for them because it cost them too much. So it depends on the individual person because you cannot generalise and say what is good and what is bad. (Dorota)

Another form of refusal to be addressed by the authoritative voice of the law was the denial of the possibility that abortion could be an imaginable course of action for the respondent:

I have never delved into this topic so that I would be able, I don’t know, to quote the bill, or simply to know exactly my abortion rights because […] I have never been in such a situation that I would be at the risk of doing it, or needed it, or had to ponder on it at all because in my situation, it was the other way round. I wanted to have a child very much; we tried very much. (Anna)

In this quote, abortion is not something that would ever be considered because of a mother’s desire to have children. Finally, as illustrated by Anna’s comment, many women in our sample felt that the maternal perspective was more weighty than the views of activists who were fighting to change the legislation but lacked a mother’s experience: ‘I feel I have more to say then I would if I did not have children. Not like an eighteen-year-old who joins the protest because “her body – her decision”’.

Religious authority

At the core of the Catholic activism against abortion is the idea of the ‘protection of human life from conception until natural death’. Together with ‘protecting women’ it is the staple of the religious and right-wing construction of the anti-abortion stance (Koralewska and Zielińska 2021). Our respondents reproduced these two notions to some degree and some women recognised the Catholic upbringing as a source of their views. Justyna, who expressed relatively strong anti-abortion sentiments, described the origins of her views, as follows: ‘well, for sure Catholic upbringing and for sure the commandment “do not kill”’. The idea that a pregnant woman carries a person from the moment of conception was rarely expressed in abstract terms. The maternal knowledge based on the lived experiences of the corporeality of pregnancy and the early post-partum period took prominence over purely religious argumentation. Sensing the developing foetus and observing changes to the maternal body it causes, combined with Catholic teaching on the moment of fertilisation as the beginning of human personhood, in most cases strengthened the anti-abortion attitudes. Some respondents ascribed the lack of the embodied awareness to women who decide to have an abortion. As such, these women were framed as lacking knowledge and the adequate understanding of their changed status, and not making informed choices. ‘I think the women who talk about abortion, they simply do not know what they are talking about because they do not feel it, even when they are pregnant, they don’t feel that there is a living person there’, said Alicja.

As the abdominal movement, pressure and stretching during pregnancy is experienced as caused by a child, the maternal body is not only acted upon by discourses on abortion, but it also participates in the legitimisation of certain narratives by lending them material plausibility. It is through the body that the abstract ‘unborn child’ is grasped as a corporeal child with its physical shape and physiological reactions. Justyna described the process in the following way: ‘What changed in me was that I could no longer call this child a plasm or a cluster of cells because I felt those little legs swooshing through my belly, I felt the hiccups of this little child’. In a similar way, Zofia stated: ‘I think that becoming a mother sharpened my objection to abortion, the experience of pregnancy, when the child resembles a child very soon, how soon it moves’.

In the anti-abortion narratives drawing on religion, the ideas about motherhood are essentialised and largely abstracted from the everyday life experiences of women. Women, regardless of the costs, should continue with a pregnancy, thus the women who seek abortion are morally weak and ‘failing in a central tenet of womanhood’ (Lowe and Page 2019, 167). The norms define what is intelligible, provide coercive criteria for ‘normal’ or ‘good’ mothers and force compliance as regulatory standards (see Butler 2004). Thus, our respondents strived to approximate the standards in order to be intelligible as mothers. The religiously shaped normative notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers had a prominent place in their moral reasonings. However, some of our respondents were able to explicitly reject the Church’s teaching on the grounds of their own maternal knowledge. They questioned its legitimacy and universal applicability by stressing the Church’s detachment from ‘real life’ and its estrangement from the everyday experiences of lay people in general and of mothers in particular. Alicja, for example, stated: ‘I think that the Church interferes unnecessarily, and it irritates me a lot. I am not pro-abortion, but if one day some tragedy happened to me … I think a woman should have a choice’. Monika, who reiterated the ‘bad mother’ narrative endowed the category with a new meaning. She contested the view that features ascribed to mothers in religious discourses, such as love, caring or compassion are universal attributes of women and evoked the figures of a bad, degenerate mother not to argue that women who have abortion are bad mothers but to reason that it might be better if bad mothers had abortions: ‘[…] not every woman is fit to become a mother, there are sadists out there and it is better if they do not have children […] If she was to kill the child later, to dismember it, like some of the mothers do, it would be better for this child not to see the light of day’. Conversely, a good mother who needs to give birth to a seriously ill child, suffers unnecessarily: ‘[…] it is horrible suffering for the mother when she sees the child and that child lives for one year. The mother gets used to the child, and then it dies. It is better to kill it in the womb, before she sees it, so she suffers less’.

Despite the strong focus on the family crisis and protection of the family in the Church discourse in recent years (Szwed 2018), the mothers we spoke to did not internalise religious views on the matter. Beata, for example, challenged the authority of the Church in the following way: ‘I decided there was no point to even read this. What do they know about this? They are not authentic to me in this matter because they don’t have children; they are no authority here’. The lack of the practical experiences of the hierarchs made their knowledge less legitimate (Adamiak 1999). Further on, Beata pointed out that the lack of maternal knowledge made clergymen indifferent to the mother’s struggle and suffering: ‘we should protect [life] in every case, and so on, but I never met a priest who would be willing to help a mother of a child with Down’s syndrome, or … “You have given birth, so you worry about this”. So this is a hypocrisy, quite strong, in my opinion’. From the maternal perspective, a serious concern for the welfare of the family required a more nuanced approach to abortion than its unequivocal condemnation. Talking about a hypothetical pregnancy which would pose a risk to her own life, Anna reasoned: ‘Whether I would have an abortion … I already have our firstborn child and my husband is sick. He is waiting for a transplant, we don’t know what will happen in the future. So I have to think about this young child’.

The rejection of the authority of the Church by some women was enacted by the careful construction of a boundary between the more abstract elements of the faith which were accepted and internalised and those which could be scrutinised and questioned. In Monika’s experience, making this delineation placed her at the margins of her religion. She is a young mother of two boys who is trying to raise her children in Catholic religion and to be a role model when it comes to collective religious practices. She is, however, explicitly opposing the teaching of the Church on abortion. As the quote below illustrates, she recognises the liminality of her position marked by the tension between her identification with Catholicism and her views on abortion:

I believe in God, I believe in hell and heaven, I believe that we have to live well to deserve heaven, and that we live to die because we have these bodies and our souls, I believe in those things. But I also believe that we have a choice and we are directing our life and with this abortion … It is kind of going against God, against God’s decision. No, somehow with the religion I am skirting heaven and skirting hell. You have to pray a little and to think for yourself a little. Because God gave you this child, according to religion, right? And you want to kill it, so you are going against God’s will, right? (Monika)

Monika not only names the basic tenets of her faith but also partially reproduces Catholic discourse on abortion by equating it with the ‘killing of a child’. Her ‘thinking for herself’, however, is a form of subversive performance (Butler 1990) by which she is reclaiming the spheres of life in which the maternal knowledge takes priority over religious authority. Thus, her maternal knowledge is not subordinate in relation to religious knowledge but in some contexts operates independently.

Most of our respondents considered abortion a sin, but identified, as Beata put it, ‘mitigating circumstances’. The women indicated many such circumstances, but the most frequently mentioned one was the reduction of pointless suffering. As mothers who were able to imagine the suffering of a child or its mother, they were prepared to commit a sin. Striving to retain their Catholic identity many women who rejected the authority of the Church in matters of reproduction attempted to circumvent the religious institution and drew on their direct relationship with God. Krystyna, for example, evoked the idea of God as a father and remarked that God is the kind of father who gives his children the freedom to make choices, including choices regarding pregnancies. The Catholic Church in Poland, in her opinion, presents the opposite attitude: the clergy is treating lay people as ‘sheep’, encroaching on their freedom and enforcing strict rules on them.

The relationship with God was also referenced by these women who were strongly against abortion or were reluctant to take a stance. Iza emphasised her trust in God, which freed her from the fear of a life-threatening pregnancy: ‘I start with the idea that life is a gift from God. If he wants me to live, he will do everything to let me live. And because he is the almighty God, I can rely on him. And this is my reference point to such situations.’ While Monika, quoted earlier, was asking if the decision to have an abortion would mean she was rejecting God’s will, Edyta perceived herself as able to negotiate with God: […] I have always told myself and that is my deal with God, that if I were to give birth to a sick child, I prefer not to have children. Because I would not be able to cope. (…) So, [God] do not put me to the test’. She constructed being spared difficult choices as the precondition of her motherhood, and as a mother, she felt protected by God from the abortion quandary.

In our sample, there were also women who considered the stance of the Church as legitimate but disparate with the socio-economic conditions of some women. The mothers opposed, among other things, the legal changes motivated by the teaching of the Church but not backed up by a sufficient social welfare system:

The problem here is the state. I think that it is right for the Church to safeguard life, but the state should have better provision in these situations. If the institutional help was different, like in developed countries, women’s approach would be very different. As it is, the state is forcing women to be heroes and this should not be the case. (Maria)

Although in this example, Maria is seemingly submitting to the religious authority and recognising it as legitimate, by juxtaposing the stance of the Church with the living conditions of some mothers shaped by the state institutions, she is discursively suspending its applicability.

Medical authority

In many contexts, bio-medicine is seen as a system replacing religion by providing alternative views on the relationship between human beings and their bodies, and the experiences of pain and suffering (Burns Coleman and White 2010). The increasing medicalisation of pregnancy and childbirth in the West has been significantly shaping women’s views, expectations and actions (Oakley 1984). However, as Burns Coleman and White (2010), 13) observe, ‘medical science is deeply coloured by cultural and religious beliefs’. In our respondents’ narratives on pregnancy and abortion, Catholic teaching and medical knowledge rarely functioned as completely separate interpretation repertoires. In this, young mothers partially reproduced mainstream discourses fusing medical and religious knowledge and creating an alliance between the two to either oppose or support the right to abortion.

For Edyta, modern medicine was a part of God’s creation given to people to enhance their ability to make ethical decisions. Thus, she was able to discursively reconcile medical guidance with religious authority:

My friend found out that the child was dead and that the foetus needed to be removed, but she said no. For me this is stupid. God created wise people, clever people, so that these doctors could react. This is why we have this technology, all kinds of equipment, knowledge, to support. (Edyta)

Some of our respondents evoked the perennial questions about the personhood of the embryo and argued that modern medicine supports the principle of the sanctity of human life from the moment of conception. For them, medical knowledge, enhanced by the use of ultrasound technology, was providing evidence that from the early stages of pregnancy, the woman carries ‘a child’. Beata, for example, asserted: ‘First of all medical knowledge shows that from the moment of conception, the child is a child, not some kind of bean, or something like that. We are talking about life here, not about a bean’.

Legal barriers in accessing abortion in Poland are coupled with many additional restrictions resulting from the influence of the Church on the medical establishment (Desperak 2003). In some instances, physicians who performed abortions have been boycotted and publicly shamed (Mishtal 2015). Some of our respondents mobilised their maternal knowledge to challenge the authority of the physicians who were not opposing abortion in a similar way. Recalling the birth of her child, Hanna questioned the integrity of obstetricians who terminated pregnancies and their fitness to assist women at birth: ‘We have this doctor who needs to do the procedure and then the same doctor is delivering my baby. I am not sure if I want to be in the hands of a doctor who sees my child as some kind of chicken to be slaughtered.’ Her rejection of the compromised medical authority was only partial, as later on during the same interview she drew on the authority of medicine to position herself as somebody who is radically against abortion. She re-defined the abortion performed in a situation of a threat to women’s health or life, as a non-abortion:

If there is a direct threat to mother’s life, for example, in case of ectopic pregnancy, I know how this procedure is done. A part of fallopian tube, where the child is implanted is removed. The child cannot be implanted outside of the uterus, or the fallopian tube […] And this is not pregnancy termination, the goal here is not an abortion. This is a removal of a part of mother’s tissue, it is a lifesaving surgery. We are not dealing with abortion here. (Hanna)

Through reiteration of norms related to protection of woman’s life, and the use of ‘medical knowledge’, she was able to bridge the cleavage between two seemingly irreconcilable positions: that of somebody who is radically against abortion and that of somebody who does not agree with sacrificing a woman’s life in the attempt to save unviable pregnancy.

The maternal knowledge of the physical reality of pregnancy can, in some cases, also be evoked together with a medical discourse to argue in support of abortion. Natalia for example, spoke about the physical changes signalling the bodily costs of bearing a child which she experienced in her first pregnancy:

If somebody decided to terminate the pathological pregnancy, she will recover sooner. The muscles of the uterus will not stretch, same with the belly muscles. The child will not take so many minerals. Let’s not cheat ourselves, pregnancy is a very difficult time for the woman’s body. […] I gave birth and I had coloured hair and my hair yellowed from one day to the next. (Natalia)

The reproduction of the medical knowledge in context of abortion was not limited to the materiality of the female body, conception and pregnancy. Some women also used psychiatric categories to argue against abortion, as a cause of ‘trauma’, or ‘depression’. Hanna stated: ‘I have not found any research showing a positive influence of abortion on the perception of their own fertility, femininity, and their life in general, or showing how abortion does not make them fall into depression’. Arguing from a paternalistic perspective, she argued that mothers should be protected from negative psychological consequences of abortion reproducing the idea that abortion is harmful to women which took deep roots in Poland.

Discussion

The views on acceptable vs unacceptable reasons for abortion varied considerably among the Catholic mothers in our sample. What their narratives had in common was the foregrounding of maternal knowledge which brings women’s individual, lived experiences of motherhood into the discussion on abortion. As mothers, the Catholic women we interviewed were able to oppose the homogenisation and essentialisation of women and agentically engage with the complexities of reproductive choices. Rather than reproducing the reasoning based on the assumed universality of social and material realities, the women foregrounded their maternal knowledge and considered the possibility of abortion in the context of particular life circumstances. The strong focus on personal experiences and individual stories resulted in the lack of transparent, fixed meanings.

In the narratives we analysed, the standpoints of pro-choice and anti-abortion ‘camps’ were not reproduced in a consistent way. This finding is in sharp contrast to the patterns observed in the publicised discourses on abortion, whereby each narrative can be easily identified as representative of one of the polarised stances (Szpakowska 2003). The power of the dominant ideologies represented by the opposing camps accompanied by coercion through the legal system does not appear to be effected to the extent which yields complete identification.

In popular discourses, those supporting access to abortion are often identified as ‘feminists’ and juxtaposed with ‘ordinary women’ (Imbierowicz 2012). The feminists are constructed as rejecting the traditional gender roles, threatening the existing structures of dominance, uprooted, anti-Catholic and ideologically homogenous (Hall 2019). In this view ‘an imaginary divide between “feminists” and “mothers”’ situates the experiences of the ‘domesticated’ mothers as better aligned with the conservative outlook (Król and Pustułka 2018, 379). Significantly, abortion is often seen as the antithesis of motherhood; women, who are first and foremost mothers, are naturally constructed as disposed to want to (always) provide for children and those who terminate pregnancy are rejecting their biological destiny (Bourgeois 2014). The data presented here demonstrates that young Catholic mothers distance themselves from these framings and by evoking their lived maternal knowledge, identify their shortcomings and inaccuracies.

The feminist literature on agency has been criticised for the restricted notion of agency, which starts with false dichotomies of empowered versus victimised and liberated versus subordinated and positions religious women as lacking agentic powers (Avishai 2008; Mahmood 2005; Burke 2012). Such narrow framing creates blind spots hiding from view forms of agency not necessarily equated with the resistance to oppression, but entailing some forms of compliance detached ‘from the goals of progressive politics’ (Mahmood 2005). In our study, mothers who supported access to abortion and those who opposed it manifested agenting engagement with the authoritative knowledges about childbearing. By engaging their maternal knowledge they all produced intricate, yet often inchoate, and idiosyncratic narratives about abortion which included varying degrees of resistance and compliance. Through their maternal knowledge, our participants address the tension between the notions of the maternal body as a sensing entity and the body as an object of signification (Mahmood 2005).

Our participants constructed in public discourses as ‘mothers’ and ‘carers’, are placed in the realm of the home and family, away from the political realm and are regarded as the objects of reproductive policies. Although they refrained from any forms of activism and therefore chose a position which does not allow them to be heard in public, they refused to be silenced by being defined by their relation to the dominant ‘camp’. Their maternal knowledge constituted the ‘disqualified knowledge’ through which resistance is performed (Foucault 1980, 82).

Being subjected to the social norms and regulations regarding abortion obscures the emotional dimension of motherhood. For nearly all our respondents, being confronted with the possibility of having to face the abortion dilemma compelled fear – an emotion almost completely disenfranchised in the public sphere. Although fear, worry and self-doubt were prevalent in the narratives of the mothers, regardless of their attitudes towards abortion, these feelings are absent in the dominant discourses. The expression of maternal knowledge allowed our respondents to challenge the hegemony of the inherently masculine framing where morality is based on ‘reason’ exemplified by the medical and religious authoritative knowledges (Oakley 1981). They pivoted away from the ‘objective’, expressed subjective feelings, including fear, and rejected the possibility of fully embracing the legally, religiously, or medically constructed norms related to abortion. These findings complement the proposal put forward by Irene Oh, who postulated that ‘critical views of religion and society are largely possible as the result of accurate and complex, rather than simplistically idealised, renderings of motherhood’ (Oh 2010, 639).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Centre Poland, under Grant [2019/35/D/HS1/00181].

Notes

1. Reliance on survey data regarding abortion attitudes is problematic for several reasons (Jagannathan 2001). 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 2020).

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 1997, 58).

3. In 2020, 53% of 25–34 year-old Polish women had a tertiary qualification (OECD 2021).

4. According to opinion polls, women with higher levels of education and those from larger cities have a more liberal approach to abortion (CBOS 2020, 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.