The crew of a Dutch abortion ship, which offers abortions in international waters to women in countries where the procedure is more restricted, accuses Poland of denying the vessel entry into port, according to Reuters.
A storm on the Baltic Sea forced the ship to anchor offshore on Friday.
The charterer of the vessel, the Dutch group, Women on Waves, said port authorities then failed to provide a promised pilot to bring the ship in and an attempt to enter Gdynia harbor overnight
was thwarted by protesters who hurled insults and eggs, according to the Australian Broacasting Corporation.
The boat’s arrival ”presents a legal and moral problem,” Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski told state radio Trojka, according to Agence France-Presse.
The ship’s crew seeks to circumvent restrictive Polish abortion law by offering free abortion pills, contraception and advice to interested Polish women. The group plans to take women aboard
and sail 12 miles out into international waters to administer the pills.
Poland’s abortion law, introduced in 1997, is considered the most restrictive in Europe and Polish Pope John Paul II, head of the world’s billion Catholics and a staunch opponent of abortion, is
widely regarded as the country’s greatest moral authority.
Abortion in Poland is only permitted as a last resort – if a woman has been raped, if the unborn baby is deformed, or if the woman would die without the procedure. Doctors face up to three
years in jail for illegal abortions.
A spokeswoman for Women on Waves, says the group’s mission is not to perform abortions, but to ”draw attention to the fact that Poland anti-abortion law is bad, absurd, very easy to circumvent, and routinely circumvented,” reports Agence France-Presse.
The Polish League of Families has asked prosecutors to ban the boat from mooring anywhere in Poland, arrest its crew members for ”instigating crime” and impound the vessel.
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