Since Texas effectively banned most abortions, I've been in a state of perpetual deja vu. The media coverage and the language used at both ends of the political spectrum all ring close to home. Weirdly so, given that home is 5,000 miles away from Texas.
I'm Polish, and most of my life I've lived under one of the strictest abortion laws in the world. Until recently, the procedure was legal in only three instances: when pregnancy resulted from rape or incest, when it posed a threat to the mother's life, or in cases of severe and irreversible fetal abnormalities. In October 2020, the law was was made even more restrictive—despite a series of nationwide abortion-rights demonstrations — to rule out the third instance, which accounted for 98 percent of legal abortions in Poland.
Ada Petriczko is the 2021 Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow at the International Women's Media Foundation and a research fellow at MIT's Center for International Studies. Full text of this Boston Globe opinon piece is available here. Full text is available to the MIT community at the MIT Libraries here.
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