Human rights and democracy in the Polish abortion debates : concepts, discourses, subversions

This article analyzes debates about restrictive abortion legislation in Poland introduced in 1993. It studies these debates from the perspective of human rights and democratic conceptualizations constructed within three main abortion discourses in Poland: the pro-life national-Catholic discourse; the pro-choice liberal individual discourse; and the pro-choice feminist discourse. The point of departure of this article is the observation that while all these positions have invoked human rights and democratic rhetoric with strong positive implications, they have also pursued radically different interpretations of human rights and democracy. This article argues that, in the Polish post-communist abortion context, universal notions of human rights and democracy have become extremely powerful political instruments for the articulation of particular interests and identities. This article analyzes these notions as contingent, relational, and contextual. It also argues that the deficiencies and defects of the Polish abortion debate were not induced primarily by the great polarization, antagonism and radicalization of the pro-life and pro-choice discourses, but by attempts to align the concepts of human rights and democracy with one particular political-moral option, and consequently to lock these concepts outside the political.