Why, in fact, should women giving birth to their long-awaited children bear the costs of shortages in the resources of the National Health Fund (NFZ)? Why have male politicians, so far deeply engaged in facilitating abortion, now set their sights on them? – asks Katarzyna Gójska in Gazeta Polska.
After the ruling of the Constitutional Tribunal concerning the so-called eugenic grounds, most of today’s governing coalition led thousands of women and girls into the streets. There were attacks on churches (as if it were the Catholic Church that had issued the ruling), and teenage girls were pulled into protests instead of attending classes, expected to demand abortion rights. The aim was to make the ability to end the lives of unborn children a fundamental right of women. Today, these same people are depriving mothers of the ability to decide under what conditions they want to give birth to their children. They are condemning women to pain and suffering, even though 21st-century medicine offers safe methods of alleviating it. Apparently, a woman is only meant to have the right to abortion; if she decides to give birth, she is expected to be writhing in pain. This is an almost unbelievable hypocrisy; women’s rights are invoked only when a woman chooses to terminate her own child. When she chooses to give it life, she suddenly matters very little to left-wing politicians.
Since the beginning of the year, the government, composed largely of supporters of abortion on demand, has been eliminating what were already very limited chances for thousands of Polish women, especially those living outside major cities, to receive anesthesia during childbirth. This will be the result of closing maternity wards and forcing women to travel even dozens of kilometers to reach a hospital. They will give birth in pain and humiliation, without respect for their privacy, without a sense of safety, and without regard for the difficult physiology that accompanies bringing a child into the world. I do not know what savings Tusk expects to achieve in this way; these supposed budgetary benefits are not being communicated to Polish women. They are expected to pay for them with their own pain and embarrassment, and perhaps sometimes even with a sense of shame. But why should women giving birth to their long-awaited children bear the costs of shortages in NFZ resources?
Why have they been targeted by male politicians so deeply involved in facilitating abortion until now? Access to anesthesia during childbirth in our country is at an embarrassingly low level. Closing maternity wards and replacing them with emergency departments will only worsen the situation. And the victims of Tusk’s cost-cutting measures affecting childbirth will be women from smaller towns. For them, time will turn back to the era of their grandmothers, or perhaps even great-grandmothers.