By Dave Andrusko
Good news. Today the European Court of Human Rights tossed out a challenge to Poland’s strongly pro-life abortion law, concluding the case “was not admissible because of the weakness of the evidence,” Carlo Martuscelli reported.
Following a Polish constitutional court decision in 2021, eight women brought their case to the ECHR “argu[ing] that the decision violated their human rights because it would force them to carry any future pregnancy to term, even in cases where the fetus developed abnormalities.”
The ECHR justices “ruled that the applicants did not provide enough justification to hear the case, particularly given that it concerns a hypothetical, future violation of human rights,” Martuscelli wrote.
In a press release published by the Court, the justices said
“The Court found that the applicants had failed to provide any convincing medical evidence proving that they had been at real risk of being directly affected by the 2020 legislative amendments. Nor had they produced any documents relating to their personal circumstances, making it impossible to assess their individual situations.”
In October 2022 the constitutional Tribunal ruled that abortions for reasons of fetal abnormality violate the Polish constitution. “Since 1,074 of the 1,110 legal abortions in Poland in 2019 were done for this reason (many of them for conditions like Down syndrome), this effectively banned most abortions,” Michael Cook wrote.