Paper short abstract:

Poland has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe and a "conscience clause" allowing doctors to refuse to perform an abortion due to moral or religious convictions. Since 2016, the "Abortion Dream Team" stands against this ban by informing women how to obtain medical abortion.

Paper long abstract:

"Contemporary Women's Hell ...". Under this title the leading Polish women's organization FEDERA published 2007 its report on the question of abortion in Poland. Since then, there has been hesitant progress in terms of reproductive autonomy. After the conservative PiS party won the elections in 2015, on-going efforts of fundamentalist pro-life actors and the Catholic Church to ban all abortions dominate the public discourse. In order to oppose these attempts, the feminist initiative "Abortion Dream Team" organizes pro-choice demonstrations and holds workshops teaching women how to obtain and self-manage a medical abortion. The rule-breaking collective aims to start a new public conversation about the reality of abortion in Poland, unburdened by the language of stigma, morality, or politics. This pro-choice activism serves as the backdrop for the investigation of the logics of representation and negotiation of gender in Poland by taking the nexus of politics, religion and affects into account. While reflecting the polarized struggle for political and cultural hegemony, the protesters break long established narrations on gender equality, human rights and corporeal autonomy. In accordance with the ethnological actor- and subject-cantered approach and based on the methodological triangulation of participant observation and discourse analysis, their pro-choice practices and protest strategies move into the focus of the contribution exploring the assemblage among gendered bodies, affects, and politics in contemporary Warsaw. Drawing on the theoretical approach of protest as "doing emotion" (Scheer), the paper addresses affective symbols, motivations and codings of the protesters by analysing demonstrations and visual protest media.