Catholic fundamentalist offensive. Opinion polls continue to show 70% against any restriction on women's rights in
Poland and more than a million people — twice the number needed for a referendum under the proposed law - have already come out in favour of a referendum on abortion.
The mobilization around the abortion issue may also provide a possibility for filling the persistent lack of a real women's organization in Poland. Many women's groups came back to life last year and have the potential to take initiatives and make their presence felt.
One such group is the Solidarnosc
Women's Commission which began to work in 1989. From that time date its first publications and educational sessions for women union militants; women were able to make their views known in the union and in negotiations with the government.
The provisional presidium of the Solidarnos National Commission was dissolved in May 1991 by the union's national leadership following a dispute after the union's second national congress voted in favour of a legal ban on abortion. Subsequently, the women's commission in
Wroclaw organized referenda in several big enterprises, in which between 80 and 90% of the workers, both women and men, came out against an abortion ban.
The national leadership then forbade them from speaking out in public, publishing newspapers and expressing positions on abortion, expelled whole branches and shut down the training programme for women militants. After this, the union's women's commissions were able to continue activity only in certain regions, including Wroclaw. The mobilization in defence of the right to choose allowed them to break out of their isolation, to organize meetings and debates on how to defend women's social and democratic rights, to renew links between regions and make contact with other women's organizations. *
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