Priests have been asked to read out a letter from the bishops’ conference
Poland is looking to impose a complete ban on abortions.
The Polish prime minister, Beata Szydło, said she backs moves towards a total ban on abortion, in a sign the nationalist government may be set to turn its attention to the nuclear family.
A campaign against abortion is due to be launched this Sunday in the country’s Roman Catholic churches. Priests have been asked to read out a letter from the bishops’ conference calling for Poland’s existing, limited abortion rights to be scrapped.
After mass on church steps, anti-abortion group Fundacja Pro will gather petition signatures for a citizen’s parliamentary bill calling for a total ban.
That’s right, women – no escape for you. Not if you’re raped, not if your pregnancy is threatening your life, not if you have an incomplete miscarriage and develop a raging infection – no abortion for you. The priests said so. The celibate men who will never be forced to give birth to a baby have said you have to be subject to being forced to give birth to a baby. The priests are in charge, and you’re just machines for the manufacture of babies.
Poland already strictly limits access to abortion. A 1993 law grants it up to the 25th week from conception, but only on the condition that the woman’s life is in danger, the pregnancy is the result of criminally proven rape or incest, or the foetus is “seriously malformed”.
The bishops’ letter, signed on Wednesday, calls the current law a compromise, adding: “The life of every person is protected by the fifth of the Ten Commandments: thou shalt not kill. Therefore the position of Catholics in this regard is clear and unchanging.’’
Except of course that a fetus isn’t a person in that sense.
Monika Płatek, a prominent member of Poland’s Women’s Congress, said the prime minister’s view illustrated the influence of the church on the ruling Law & Justice party.
“The bishops do not care if a woman dies. Szydło is a puppet. The abortion ban was the condition of the church’s support for Law & Justice. The move is typical of an arbitrary state that uses support for moral ideas to take total control.
“We saw it under Hitler and Ceaușescu and now we are seeing it under Law & Justice,’’ said Płatek, a professor of law at the University of Warsaw.
Authoritarians and god-botherers can just never get enough of grinding women into the dirt.
“Excepting those occasions where God Himself temporarily rescinded the law so as to smite the shit out of people, or to order his lads to commit genocide and mass rape against whomsoever he didn’t consider to be His chosen people, even though He created all people… We guess He just made some of them inferior so that His lads would have some fools to kill for fun or something… Please don’t point out how inconsistent and immoral our religion is.”
Christians have always been at war with Eastasia.
(Which is to say, this idea that “Of course abortion is wrong! Just read the Bible!” isn’t quite as established as “everyone” believes.)
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/says_about/abortion.html
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/02/18/the-biblical-view-thats-younger-than-the-happy-meal/
So much for socialism being inherently a good thing. Otherwise it is obviously.
You would think, if “thou shalt not kill” was so blindingly clear, then the Catholic church would have long ago abolished the death penalty, and war, and they’d all be vegetarians.
Blood Knight in Sour Armour @ 3,
What’s socialism got to do with it? Poland is governed by the Law and Justice Party, generally recognised as right-wing conservatives.
Maureen #5:
Perhaps the Law and Justice Party is generally recognised as such in the West. Not so in Poland.
Sure, they are against abortion and gay marriages, they want religion to stay at our schools, at every step they promote our national myths, symbols and martyrs.
On the other hand, they want e.g. a lower age of retirement, financial suport for large families and nationalization of a part of the banking sector.
For quite a while they’ve been emphasizing the differences between “Poland A” and “Poland B” – between the well-off and well-educated urban professionals (often described by them as “the lying elite”) and the poor, unemployed dwellers of small towns and villages. They’ve been presenting themselves as the defenders of all those who were left behind by the democratic/liberal changes. “Our opponents promoted liberalism and just look at the disastrous effects! What we promote is social solidarity” – that was their standard approach. This is also a partial explanation of their present success.
It seems to me that they are rarely viewed as “right-wing conservatives” here. Some of their fiercest opponents call them national socialists – indeed, what they present is a curious mixture of the right-wing and the leftist ideas.
At least we know this isn’t the fault of nice Pope Francis, who I’m told is totally progressive because he gave a sermon somewhere and said we should be generous to the poor or something.
As mentioned upthread, it was necessary to change the words in the Bible with regard to the death of a fetus in order to accommodate the current anti abortion position of religious authoritarians. An act specifically forbidden by Bible scripture.
This is why I care more about what politicians’ stances on the issues are rather than what demographic group they are in. Not specific to the current race for POTUS, and Clinton is better than the GOP– just that anti-choice women are more common than most people seem to expect and that we need to change society, not just help a few women get into power and expect them to fix things.