The Polish government’s representative for disabled persons, Deputy Minister of Family Paweł Wdówik, who is also legally blind, commented on the Polish Constitutional Court’s ban on eugenic abortions from the perspective of a disabled person.
“It is finally thanks to the court’s verdict that as a disabled person, I have the feeling that no one is refusing the right to live to disabled people,” he declared during a hearing in the Polish Parliament (Sejm) concerning the “For life” program, which is financed from the “Solidarity Fund for Supporting Disabled People”. The hearing was designed to evaluate the potential effects of the Constitutional Court’s new abortion ban on abortions for unborn children with disabilities.
The deputy minister added that disabled people can live happy lives despite having Down’s syndrome, missing limbs, being blind or deaf. He also added that he is not a member of the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, according to Polish news outlet Gosc.pl.
“I am here because this is the first government which has guaranteed disabled people the ability to influence their own situation,” he said.
In support of the court’s verdict, Wdówik said Poland had also ratified the convention of rights of disabled people which guarantees civic rights to many people with disabilities. He noted that thankfully both the right and left respect the convention.
Wdówik said that the organizers of the current pro-abortion protests are manipulating the truth. The deputy minister explained that over 1,000 abortions carried out in 2019 concerned only suspicions of disabilities and not lethal flaws.
“It would be good of you to mention that, while sending 14 and 15-year-old girls onto the streets,” he stressed.
Wdówik emphasized that a “certain part of the Sejm” is very good at manipulating disabled people. He pointed out that it was PiS which introduced a bill which facilitated access to public and digital service for disabled people, as well as the Solidarity Fund.
He also commented on opposition MPs attempts to blockade parliament deliberations on Tuesday, calling them pathetic.
According to data from the Ministry of Health for 2019, 1,110 pregnancy termination operations were carried out in Poland that year, and 1,074 were conducted due to the high likelihood of a serious or irreversible disability of the fetus or an uncurable disease. Of those cases, 271 concerned Down syndrome without other flaws and 164 related to Down syndrome with concurrent flaws. Another 200 cases entailed flaws of two or more organs within the fetus’s body.
