After a yearlong “war on abortion” polarizing the country, a near-total abortion ban came into effect in Poland in early 2021. Since then, abortion is only permitted in situations of risk to the life/health of a pregnant woman, or if a pregnancy results from incest or rape. In practice, however, it is almost impossible for those eligible for a legal abortion to obtain one, making ‘abortion tourism’ and the import of abortion pills boom. This contemporary socio-political transformation of the reproductive reality in Poland boosts the emergence of new feminist activism and resistance against this ‘new’ reproductive surveillance. Since 2016, the feminist initiative Abortion Dream Team (ADT) opposes the ban with an unapologetic attitude by: organizing pro-choice demonstrations and workshops teaching women how to obtain and self-manage a medical abortion; disseminating subversively creative images against abortion stigmatization; and by offering a broad platform for ‘reproductive herstories’ and public ‘abortion coming-out’. Since 2021, the rule-breaking collective and founding member of the international initiative Abortion Without Borders, have helped 100.000 women seeking abortion to fulfil their ‘abortion hopes’ and published over 150 abortion herstories.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and feminist approaches to “strategic sisterhood” (Nyhagen Predelli/Halaa), politics of aesthetics (Rancière), and protest mobilization as “connective action” (Korolczuk), the paper investigates the logics and strategies of abortion stigma deconstruction practiced by the ADT as: discursive field of conflict, manifestation of power relations within the Polish ‘culture war’, body of gendered knowledge production and governance, emotional strategy of social activism and aesthetic practice in popular media. Finally, the study considers some implications of pro-abortion activism and its aesthetic techniques for feminist movement and aims at a critical discussion of pro-choice interventions and their political power(lessness) to create transformative social change in a time of rising populism, anti-genderism and religious fundamentalism in Europe.
