Since 24 February, when Russia invaded Ukraine, 3,317,000 million people have crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border into Poland, the Polish Border Guard has reported on 12 May morning. EPA-EFE/DAREK DELMANOWICZ Claudia CiobanuWarsawBIRNJuly 12, 202207:14 Ukrainian women who became pregnant after being raped by Russian soldiers undergo abortions in Poland under the same conditions as Polish women: in secret and often without access to proper medical care. “Please help me take this out of my body”: this is what one Ukrainian woman raped by Russian soldiers, who had escaped to Poland, told her interlocutor on the helpline that she called, according to Krystyna Kacpura, head of the Polish NGO Federa, the Foundation for Women and Family Planning. Federa, which has a long history of helping Polish women enforce their reproductive rights, has set up a separate helpline for Ukrainian refugees since the war in their country started almost five months ago, run by a Ukrainian gynaecologist. The woman told the helpline that she had been raped, but didn’t want that information to come to light and put an additional burden on her husband who was still fighting in Ukraine. “I didn’t even see their faces properly,” the woman said of the attackers. “I fainted after the third one raped me. I’d like to forget about this as soon as possible. I don’t want to be regarded as a victim of rape.” Like other Ukrainian rape victims who reached Poland and contacted women’s rights groups for help in terminating their unwanted pregnancies, this woman ended up having a pharmacological abortion at home, in secret, using drugs sent by women’s rights activists living abroad, Kacpura said. Since Poland’s right-wing government engineered further restrictions on abortion in 2020, the country now has one of the toughest regimes over the practice in the world. Today, it’s only possible to terminate a pregnancy in the case when the mother’s life is in danger or if the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest. While Ukrainian women raped by Russian soldiers would normally qualify for a legal abortion in Poland, the procedure used to determine whether the pregnancy can be legally terminated is so cumbersome as to make it useless, women’s rights advocates say. No exceptions have been made for Ukrainian refugees either, meaning that most of them end up terminating unwanted pregnancies by taking medication at home and forfeiting the complex post-rape medical care that is usually offered in such cases.
via balkan insight: UKRAINIAN WAR RAPE VICTIMS ABANDONED BY POLISH STATE