Abortion’s New Back Alley

Abortion activists have launched a new strategy in the last remaining pro-life regimes in Europe, creating dangerous de facto back alleys. In Poland, activists with Abortion Dream Team and Women Help Women have launched the “AbortOmat,” a pink twenty-two-compartment locker full of abortion pills that can be accessed via anonymously provided six-digit codes. Polish law forbids providing abortion pills but not taking them. The locker thus rests in a legal gray area.

“And why not?” demanded Kinga Jelinska, director of Women Help Women and co-founder of Abortion Dream Team. “You can order underwear, cosmetics, mascara, whatever and receive it practically the same or next day. Why not abortion pills, where in some cases there might be more urgency?”

The obvious answer, of course, is that the purpose of abortion pills is to kill a human being developing in the womb. But Jelinska knows that journalists aren’t going to confront her with that fact. The mainstream press has been functioning as the propaganda arm for Polish abortion activists for years; media coverage of their latest move is characterized by frank admiration. 

Campaigners are frustrated because Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s attempts to legalize abortion have failed, despite his willingness to wage an illegal war on Poland’s pro-life laws. On October 20, the Sejm passed two limited bills—one decriminalizing abortion assistance, the other legalizing abortion in the case of fetal abnormality—but President Karol Nawrocki is likely to veto them. After the vote, a presidential aide confirmed Nawrocki’s “support for the protection of life from conception to natural death.” The abortion bills are only the latest front in an open conflict between the government and the presidential palace.

Activists call their “AbortOmat” the “world’s first parcel locker for abortion pills,” but their counterparts in Malta employed the same strategy earlier this year. In April, the Dutch NGO Women on Waves announced that fifteen lockboxes containing abortion pills had been placed across Malta and invited women to contact them for access instructions. Doctors for Choice Malta stated that all the boxes had been accessed by the end of the month (although some were obtained by pro-life activists, who destroyed the pills). 

The lockboxes were employed after the failure of a three-year campaign to legalize abortion in Malta, where it is illegal except when a woman’s life is at immediate risk. Malta has one of the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world; not a single woman died during or after childbirth from 2012 to 2023. 

In 2022, an American tourist requested and was denied an abortion in Malta after suffering ruptured membranes during pregnancy. Andrea Prudente was airlifted to Spain, where she procured an abortion via early delivery. The health minister claimed the case highlighted the need for legal abortion, and the government announced a review of Malta’s pro-life laws. The international press joined the campaign with a vengeance. The government proposed an amendment containing vague language permitting abortion if the mother’s “health” was at risk.

As I reported previously in First Things, the pro-life movement mobilized. Government officials got emails from over 25,000 people, and over 20,000 (4 percent of the population) protested in Valletta. A coalition of doctors, jurists, NGOs, and experts lobbied the government to reverse course. The government backed down. This July, a Maltese judge dismissed Prudente’s claim that Malta’s pro-life laws violated her human rights, and added that she had been “used” by abortion activists.

This failure prompted the illegal abortion pill strategy, with Women on Waves advising women who suffer complications from taking abortion pills to go to the hospital but not to tell the doctors what happened. A woman more than nine weeks pregnant called to procure the pills to expose how easy it was to do so; when she was asked if she was past the nine-week limit, she simply said no, and the access codes were given. 

The grim truth about these campaigns is that if women who take abortion pills are badly injured, the abortion movement will benefit—and activists know it. A study published last year found that 11 percent of women who take them experience a medical incident. Despite the fact that they supplied the pills, activists will claim that consequent injury or death is actually proof that abortion pills must be legalized. 

Consider the case of Amber Thurman in Georgia. Thurman died tragically in 2022 after taking abortion pills while nine weeks pregnant with twins. The abortion was not completed, Thurman became septic, and doctors failed to treat her in time. Despite the fact that Thurman died because of the abortion pills, the press claimed that she had died because of pro-life laws; Tim Walz even cited the case during the 2024 vice-presidential debate with JD Vance.

Abortion activists have facilitated a de facto back alley; they will now insist that its very existence means that legal abortion is essential to solve the problem they have deliberately (and, in most cases, illegally) created. Maternal healthcare in Malta and Poland is second to none, and abortion activists have tired of waiting. By pushing dangerous abortion pills, they may just create the tragedy they have been waiting for. 

Image by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via AP. Image cropped.