## Facts

- Poland’s Parliament amended a 1993 family planning statute in 1996 that had permitted abortion only in limited circumstances (including threats to the woman’s life or health, pregnancy from a crime, and severe fetal impairment).
- The 1996 amendment added a “social indications” ground permitting abortion when a pregnant woman was in “difficult living conditions or a difficult personal situation.”
- A group of Senators filed an abstract constitutional review application challenging several provisions of the 1996 amendment.
- The Sejm and the Public Prosecutor General participated in the proceedings as statutory parties.
- The Constitutional Tribunal heard the case at a public hearing on May 27, 1997 and issued its decision on May 28, 1997.
- The Tribunal evaluated the challenged provisions under constitutional provisions then in force, including the democratic rule-of-law clause and a general clause protecting freedoms and rights.

## Issues

1. Whether the constitutional order protects human life at the prenatal stage as a constitutional value.
2. Whether the legislature may make the level of prenatal life protection depend on ordinary statutory choice.
3. Whether permitting abortion based solely on difficult living conditions or a difficult personal situation is consistent with constitutional protection of prenatal life.
4. Whether certain other amendment provisions concerning counseling, information, and procedural matters violate constitutional guarantees.

## Decision

- The Tribunal held unconstitutional the provision insofar as it made prenatal life protection dependent on decisions of the ordinary legislature.
- The Tribunal held unconstitutional the “social indications” abortion ground permitting abortion due to difficult living conditions or a difficult personal situation.
- The Tribunal upheld other challenged provisions (including specified technical/procedural components), finding them not inconsistent with the cited constitutional provisions.
- The practical effect was to remove the 1996 social-indications liberalization and restore a more restrictive regime.

## Legal Principles

- Human life is a constitutionally protected value from its origin, and this protection extends to the prenatal phase.
- The constitutional protection of life cannot be differentiated solely by stage of development without constitutionally justified criteria.
- The legislature lacks open-ended authority to lower constitutional protection of prenatal life by ordinary statute.
- Abortion authorization based only on social hardship fails constitutional review where it permits the destruction of constitutionally protected life without showing necessity and where less restrictive state measures (such as social assistance) could address the hardship.
- Statutory provisions addressing counseling, information, or procedures may be upheld when they do not expand abortion grounds in a manner inconsistent with constitutional life protection.

## Conclusion

The Constitutional Tribunal invalidated statutory provisions that subordinated prenatal life protection to legislative discretion and that permitted abortion on broadly framed social grounds, reasoning that the constitutional order protects human life from its beginning, including the prenatal stage, and requires that any limitation be justified under constitutional standards rather than ordinary policy choice.


Family Planning Act Amendment (Pol.), K. 26/96 (Const. Trib. May 28, 1997)