What Happens When You Lose Abortion Rights and How to Win Them Back: 6 Lessons From Poland

The cultural tier has to do with language and public imagination. The strategy is far more insidious than just taking part in public debate. Anti-choice propaganda is relentless, loud, gruesome and repetitive. It ignores reality, it appeals to deep-felt anxieties. It can be brutal, as with images of cut-up, bloody foetuses paraded in front of schools or driven around on the sides of vans. Or eerily sentimental, as with hundreds of thousands of billboards screaming at you from Poland's streets and highways: "Where are these children?". They mean those that have never been born. It's oppressive, but ultimately effective in silencing opposition.

Is Poland different from the rest of Europe because it is more Catholic? Not really. Social views on abortion are only a bit more conservative than those in Croatia, Czechia or Hungary, with polls showing that most citizens want abortion to be legal in at least some cases.

What really sets Poland apart is the political influence of the Catholic Church as an institution, its ability to exert pressure on political parties, the media and the courts. This alliance has much in common with bonds linking Republicans to the religious right in the US. Ever since the late 1970s, US Evangelicals and Catholics have managed to dictate the Republican platform on gay rights and abortion. The deal is simple: give us the courts, and we will deliver the votes. So, when Roe v. Wade fell, I wasn't particularly surprised. My heart went out to the women in the red states, now trapped in what increasingly resembles Margaret Atwood's patriarchal dystopia, Gilead. Polish women have lived there for over two decades. And here is what we have learned…

Protesters dressed as characters from 'The Handmaid's Tale' take part in a...