San Francisco Frontiers - Polish activists open first abortion pill locker in Warsaw

The small, colourfully painted locker, which activists call an "abortomat", consists of 22 compartments containing envelopes with medications allowing them to carry out medical abortions.

"It's a feminist intervention meant to show just how upside‑down things are," Kinga Jelinska, director of the Women Help Women Foundation and co-founder of the Abortion Dream Team, told AFP.

"We always think about how to make abortion care easier, more accessible, friendlier, more people‑centred," she added.

"It's simply logical and makes sense".

The facility's location -- across the street from the Polish parliament, which has failed to follow through on its pledges to relax the country's stringent abortion laws -- is purposefully symbolic.

It was here that activists decided to open an abortion centre just over a year ago.

Rather than a typical medical clinic, it provides women with access to resources, including pills, and a space to be able to seek support or carry out the pharmacological abortion.

Abortion in Poland is legal only in two circumstances: when the pregnancy resulted from a criminal act -- such as rape or incest -- or if it threatens the mother's life or health.

A 2020 decision by the Constitutional Tribunal, ruled that severe foetal abnormalities were not legal grounds for abortion.

Prior to this ruling, 98 percent of legal abortions in Poland were performed for this reason.

The new restrictions set off a torrent of protests throughout the country, which became the largest mass demonstrations in Poland since the 1989 anti-communist movement.

In the first half of 2025, only 846 legal abortions took place in Poland, according to data from the National Health Fund (NFZ) and the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe.

- Legal 'hack' -

Several pregnant women have died in Polish hospitals in recent years, in many cases after doctors refused to carry out abortions following complications, including sepsis.

But no law penalises Polish women if they carry out their own abortion, for instance with pills ordered online.

It is a legal loophole activists say allows them to keep the centre operational.

"The 'abortomat' is, in a way, a 'hack' on the law," Jelinska says.

Assisting abortion is still punishable by up to three years in jail.

The abortion centre has been met by protests from some conservative-Catholic groups in the traditionally staunchly religious country.

Poland's incumbent centrist ruling coalition promised to reverse the most restrictive elements of Poland's abortion laws prior to their election in 2023 -- but internal disagreements among its different factions have brought this to a halt.

Any attempts to ease abortion laws via parliament would also likely face a veto by conservative-nationalist President Karol Nawrocki, who was endorsed by the then ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party that brought about and upheld the 2020 court ruling.

F.Young--SFF