Friday evening was expected to see the biggest protests so far, even though President Andrzej Duda earlier in the day said he had submitted a bill that would mean less severe rules than the near-total ban on abortion signalled by a court ruling last week.
In Warsaw, thousands were marching towards the Żoliborz district, where Polish conservative leader Jarosław Kaczyński lives, state news agency PAP reported.
The agency cited opposition politicians as saying that protesters were being attacked by nationalists.
Demonstrations were also being held in a string of other Polish cities, including Gdańsk and Gdynia in the north, Wrocław in the southwest and Kraków in the south.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki had issued a plea for Friday’s protest to be called off as new coronavirus infections hit a record.
Poland reported a record rise in coronavirus infections for the fourth consecutive day on Friday, confirming 21,629 new cases, the most since the pandemic hit the country in early March.
Protests in Wrocław on Friday. Photo: PAP/Maciej Kulczyński
The street protests were sparked by a decision on Thursday by the country’s Constitutional Tribunal that abortion of a malformed foetus violates the constitution.
On Friday, before the latest wave of demonstrations, President Duda said he had submitted a bill to allow terminations of foetuses with serious defects which would have been born dead.
He said his proposal would allow abortions in cases when “prenatal tests or other medical indications point to a high probability that a child will be born dead or… with an incurable disease or defect that will inevitably and directly lead to the death of the child,” regardless of doctors’ efforts.
(pk)
Source: PAP