Many women
still take long, distressing and often expensive journeys in order to gain
access to safe abortion due to restrictive legislation in their home countries.
A reality for women around the world, from Kenya,
Mexico, Poland or Ireland, these journeys are often
referred to as "abortion tourism." 

There has always been "abortion tourism." In Europe, there are two states from which women are "escaping"
to terminate a pregnancy. The first is Ireland. Representatives from IFPA and the Safe and Legal Abortion Rights
Campaign in Ireland
reported that 200 women travel each week to the United
Kingdom from the Republic and Northern Ireland to have an
abortion. Abortion remains illegal on both sides of the island’s border, and the
penalty for helping a woman obtain an abortion is life imprisonment.

Economics
also plays a part here – Irish women making the trip have to find at least
£1000 to pay for it, which is completed in secrecy and silence. Therefore,
socio-economic status plays a huge role in whether a woman can access safe
abortion. 

However, a trip abroad
does not have to be more as expensive as some private Polish surgeries. Poland
is the second European state where the "abortion tourism" exists. As already
mentioned in a previous article (Even
Legal Abortion Is Hard to Access in Poland), the anti-abortion law in Poland is one of the most restrictive in Europe. Therefore, Polish women
very often look for a clinic in countries neighboring Poland, where it is much easier to
get a safe abortion. These countries include Czech
Republic, Germany
or Ukraine.
Just recently, Czech Republic’s cabinet unanimously approved a bill that
would extend abortion privileges and other health services to all European
Union (EU) citizens (see: Czech
Republic: Abortion Services Not "Abortion Tourism" for EU Citizens). 

The
opponents to the bill claim that the new regulations will enable "abortion
tourism" from the other European states where termination of pregnancy is
restricted, and here Poland
comes as a main example. 

It is difficult to measure the
phenomenon in Poland, but it
is still significant and growing, particularly after Poland’s accession to the European Union,
which has significantly increased the mobility of Polish women. The survey was
undertaken by the Federation on Women and Family Planning in Poland, and included in the report
entitled, Reproductive
Rights in Poland: The Effects of the Anti-Abortion Law, showed that most
often this is a dozen or so or several dozen cases annually. Abortion tourism
has an individual character. It seems that organized abortion tourism does not
currently exist on a large scale like it did in the early 90s, when there were
agencies organizing trips for women to Belarus
or to Russia
for abortions. As a result of police operations, such agencies were liquidated. 

The recent
article published in Kyiv Post by Yuliya Popova suggests evidence that Ukraine has become one of the
countries Polish women go to terminate pregnancies. Petro Gusak from the Lviv Institute
of Family and Married Life said, "It’s an entire industry. There are special
tourist buses that take Polish women in reproductive age across the border to
see the doctors." 

Wanda
Nowicka, Director of the Polish Federation for Women and Family Planning in Warsaw, said that women
with higher income travel to EUcountries. Those earning much less go to Ukraine or Belarus. Many others buy special
pills on the Web to abort a pregnancy at home. Nowicka, however, cannot produce
any documented proof for Ukraine
because "it’s all done secretly," but, the article refers to Dr. Iryna Mykychak
from the Lviv Regional Health Administration who denies any backstreet
abortions in her district. "We have not had a single foreign woman seeking that
service recently," she said. 

But,
unofficially it is said that Ukrainian doctors do not deny anyone their
services, performing at least 200,000 abortions for Ukrainian women and
possibly another few thousand for the Polish "tourists." 

While the abortion opponents talk
about abortion tourism, only the most privileged women can escape local pro-life
laws. The rest, mostly poor and young women, simply suffer. They cannot find
the money or the assistance to make such trips so they suffer the health
consequences of unsafe and illegal abortions performed in their own countries.