A Polish priest’s fight against abortion focuses on helping single mothers

SZCZECIN, Poland – The Polish state has banned abortion for 29 years, but has done little to prevent women from accessing the procedure, leaving Rev. Tomasz Kancelarczyk a busy man.

The Roman Catholic priest plays ultrasound of what he describes as fetal heartbeats in his sermons to discourage women from considering abortion. He has threatened teenage girls to tell their parents if they are going to have an abortion. He attacked couples waiting in hospital for abortions due to fetal abnormalities, which were allowed until the law was further tightened last year.

But Father Kancelarczyk’s most effective tool, he admits, may be something the state has largely neglected: helping single mothers by providing them with shelter, grocery coupons, baby clothes and, if necessary, lawyers to deal with abusive partners.

“Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the number of these cases,” said Father Kancelarczyk, 54, during a recent visit to his Little Feet House, a shelter he runs in a nearby village for single women, some pregnant, some with children, all of them. with difficulties. “There should be 200 or 300 houses like this in Poland. There is a vacuum.”

so strict abortion bans on the rise in some US statesPoland provides a sort of laboratory for how such bans ripple through societies. And one thing that is clear in Poland is that if the state is determined to stop abortion, it is less focused on what comes next – a child who needs help and support.

The Polish government has some of the most generous family benefits in the region, but still offers only minimal support to single mothers and parents of disabled children. about the same as in parts of the United States where abortion bans are introduced.

“They call themselves pro-life, but they are only interested in women until they give birth,” said Krystyna Kaccura, the chairperson of the Federation of Women and Family Planning, an advocacy group in Warsaw opposing the government ban. “There is no systemic support for mothers in Poland, especially mothers of disabled children.”

This is one of the reasons why the abortion rate doesn’t seem to have really dropped – abortions have just been driven underground or out of the country. While the number of legal abortions has fallen to about 1,000 a year, abortion rights activists estimate that 150,000 Polish women terminate a pregnancy every year, despite the ban, either by using abortion pills or by traveling abroad.

Poland’s fertility rate, currently 1.3 children per woman, is one of the lowest in Europe – half what it was during the communist era, when the country had one of the most liberal abortion regimes in the world.

The legal ban, even die-hard anti-abortion fighters like Father Kancelarczyk admit, has made “no discernible difference” to the numbers.

On the other hand, sometimes offering food, housing or a place in childcare can make a difference, and Father Kancelarczyk, who raises money through donations, proudly says that such assistance helps him “save” 40 pregnancies a year.

One was that of Beata, a 36-year-old single mother who refused to reveal her full name for fear of stigmatization in her deeply Catholic community.

When she became pregnant with her second child, she said that the child’s father and her family avoided her. No bank wanted to lend her money because she didn’t have a job. No one wanted to hire her because she was pregnant. And she received unemployment benefits because she was ‘unemployed’.

“The state is completely abandoning single mothers,” she said.

One day, sitting on the floor in her small unfurnished apartment, Father Kancelarczyk, who was warned by a friend, called her to keep the baby and offered help.

“One day I had nothing,” Beata said. “The next day he shows up with all these things: furniture, clothes, diapers. I could even choose the color of my pram.”

Nine years later, Beata works as an accountant and the son she chose, Michal, thrives in school.

For many women, Father Kancelarczyk has proved to be the only safety net—although his charity is accompanied by a brand of Christian zeal that polarises, a division that is starkly displayed in Szczecin.

Father Kancelarczyk’s Gothic red-brick church towers directly across from a liberal arts center whose windows are decorated with a row of black lightning bolts — the symbol of the Polish abortion rights movement — and a poster that reads, “My body, my choice.”

Every year, Father Kancelarczyk organizes Poland’s largest anti-abortion march, with thousands departing from his church and facing counter-protesters across the street. Before a local gay pride parade, he once called on his congregation to “disinfect the streets.”

He gets hate mail almost every day, he says, calling it “Satan’s work.”

Ms Kaccura, the advocate who opposes the government ban, says the lack of state support, especially for single mothers, has opened up the space for people like Father Kancelarczyk to “indoctrinate” women who are in financial and emotional distress.

Under communism, childcare was free and most Polish workplaces had facilities on site to encourage mothers to join the workforce. But that system collapsed after 1989, as an emboldened Roman Catholic church shrugged off the 1993 abortion ban, as it also revived a vision of women as mothers and caregivers at home.

Elected in 2015 on a pro-family platform, the nationalist and conservative Law and Justice Party saw an opportunity and approved one of Europe’s most generous child benefit programs. It was a revolution in Poland’s family policy.

But there is still a lack of childcare, a precondition for mothers to work, as well as special support for the parents of disabled children. In the past decade, groups of parents of disabled children have twice occupied the Polish parliament to protest the lack of state aid, in 2014 and 2018.

When someone contacts Father Kancelarczyk about a woman considering abortion – “usually a girlfriend” – he sometimes calls the pregnant woman. If she won’t talk, he says he will bump into her and force a conversation.

He also admonishes the fathers and waves ultrasonic images in the faces of men who want to leave their pregnant girlfriend. “If men behaved decently, women wouldn’t have abortions,” he said.

Although he is abhorred by many, he is admired in the religious communities where he preaches.

Monika Niklas, a 42-year-old mother of two from Szczecin, first attended Mass with Father Kancelarczyk, not long after learning that her unborn baby had Down syndrome. This was 10 years ago, before the ban included fetal abnormalities, and she had considered an abortion. “I thought my world was collapsing,” she said.

While on duty, Father Kancelarczyk had played a video from his phone with the sound of what he described as a fetal heartbeat.

“It was so touching,” Ms Niklas recalled. “After mass, we went to talk to him and told him about our situation.” He was one of the first to tell her and her husband they were going to make it and offered support.

After her son Krzys was born, Mrs. Niklas gave up her career as an architect to take care of him full-time. Krzys, now 9, got a place in a school only this fall, an example of how government aid falls far short of their needs.

She is now advising parents of disabled children to expect, in an effort to advise them to keep their babies — but without covering it up.

“I never just say, ‘It’ll be okay,’ because it’s going to be hard,” she said. “But if you accept that your life will be different than you imagined, you can be very happy.”

“We have these ideas about what our kids will be — a lawyer, a doctor, an astronaut,” she added. “Krzys taught me about love.”

But in all her advice, she said, one thing barely comes up: the abortion ban.

“This has not affected the way people make decisions,” she said. “Anyone who wants an abortion does it anyway, only abroad.”

Many women agreed with this.

Kasia, who also did not want her full name used because of the stigma surrounding the matter, is one of nine women currently living in Father Kancelarczyk’s shelter. She was 23 when she became pregnant. She said her boyfriend abused her – the police refused to intervene – and then left her. Her mother had kicked her out of the house. A friend contacted an abortion clinic across the border in Germany.

“It’s not hard,” she said of getting an illegal termination. “It’s a matter of getting a phone number.”

Ultimately, it was a near-miscarriage in the eighth week of her pregnancy that changed Kasia’s mind and persuaded her to carry out her pregnancy.

Father Kancelarczyk not only offered her free board and lodging in his shelter, but also a lawyer, who took the ex-boyfriend to court. He is now serving a 10-month sentence and could lose custody.

“I feel safe now,” Kasia said.

Father Kancelarczyk says the number of women who referred to him for considering having an abortion did not increase as the Polish ban was tightened for fetal abnormalities. But he still supports the ban.

“The law always has a normative effect,” he says. “What is allowed is perceived as good and what is forbidden as bad.”