Termination of Pregnancy as the Subject of Proceedings Against Poland before the European Court of Human Rights

Abstract

In Poland, women in need of termination of pregnancy are exposed, through the practice of application of law, to systemic abuse by public authorities and sometimes institutional abuse by healthcare providers. This results in the search for institutions outside of Poland to protect their reproductive rights. Therefore, it seems reasonable to draw attention to the multifaceted nature of the rationale that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has indicated in its judgments on the legal and factual state of legal abortion in Poland. This paper is an attempt to synthesize the manifestations, indicated by the ECtHR, of Poland’s violations of the provisions of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in matters relating to the termination of pregnancy. An analysis of the content of the judgments of the ECtHR and other source texts is used in this paper as the primary research method.