Hundreds of people demonstrated again in Warsaw yesterday against the tightening of Poland’s abortion law.
The police asked the demonstrators to leave via loudspeaker and tried to surround them, the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza reported.
“We have a right to protest,” the crowd chanted. The participants carried banners with slogans such as: “Don’t tell me how to live” and “Get rid of the misogynist government.”
The police have taken several people into custody, the PAP news agency reported.
Rally organizers symbolically renamed a square in the city centre as “Women’s Rights Square.”
Smaller rallies were held in other Polish cities, including Krakow and Wroclaw.
The demonstrations also marked the 102nd anniversary of the introduction of women’s suffrage in Poland on November 28, 1918.
In October, Poland’s Constitutional Court ruled that women are not allowed to have an abortion even if a foetus has severe health defects.
Since then there have been regular protests. The abortion law in the strongly Catholic country is one of the strictest in Europe.
