Dorota was in her fifth month of pregnancy, but the baby she was carrying didn’t make it to the light: due to the laws regulating the termination of pregnancy in Poland, however, the woman was left with the fetus without life in her womb for who knows how long, and she went into septic shock, which proved to be fatal for her. She died in Podhalansky hospital on May 23: she had been hospitalized urgently for a leak of amniotic fluid.
His relatives wrote a letter to Gazeta Wyborcza reporting the incident. The hospital limited itself to declaring, through the director Marek Wierba, that the woman would be “monitored”, that hers would be “a difficult pregnancy”, and that the head of the department would have observed a “rapid deterioration of the conditions of the patient, for some reason.” Safe, the NGO that helps women to have abortions, denounces how in Poland “the ban on abortion and doctors give priority to the fetus and not to the pregnant mother”.
The stringent 2019 law introduced in the country makes abortion almost impossible, but “it is legal” for doctors to intervene if the patient’s life is in danger, recalls the NGO. Dorota’s relatives have sued the hospital and doctors for malpractice. In the autumn of 2022, another woman, Izabela Sajbor, died in identical circumstances: the doctors had not wanted to risk a complaint to help her survive. Since then, according to NGOs active in Poland, there have been at least seven victims of the anti-abortion laws in the country.
