(CN) - A Polish woman caught in the chaos of her country's shifting abortion rules had to seek care abroad after months of political and legal limbo, Europe's top human rights court said Thursday, finding that the government's muddled rollout left her without clear answers when it mattered most.

Poland's problem, the judges said, wasn't the rule itself but the chaos around it. When the Constitutional Tribunal announced its abortion ruling in October 2020, the government then left it unpublished for months, keeping the old law technically in place while doctors worried it could change at any moment. That legal fog, the court said, created so much uncertainty that a pregnant woman racing against time had no real way to understand or use her reproductive rights.

The applicant was a Polish woman, identified only as A.R., who at around 15 weeks of pregnancy in early November 2021 learned that the fetus she was carrying had trisomy 18, a serious genetic disorder. 

Under Poland's 1993 abortion law she still qualified for a legal termination, but the timing was far from ideal: Just days earlier, the Constitutional Tribunal had declared that very ground unconstitutional, and the government hadn't yet published the ruling. On paper the old law still applied, but no one knew for how long.

Caught between a diagnosis that required quick decisions and a legal landscape that could shift overnight, A.R. didn't want to risk the judgment suddenly appearing and shutting the door before she could act. She was also navigating pandemic-induced border rules and unsure how individual hospitals would react. So she made the only choice she felt she had - she left Poland and traveled to the Netherlands, where she ended the pregnancy at a private clinic on Nov. 12, 2020.

A.R. later took her case to the European Court of Human Rights because she felt it was the state, not her medical diagnosis, that pushed her out of the country. In her view, if Poland had given her a clear and stable legal framework, she could have ended the pregnancy at home with proper medical care. Instead, the government's delay left everyone guessing, and doctors could not tell her with confidence what the law allowed. She said that made it impossible to make a fully informed decision about her own health.

The Polish government saw it differently. It argued that the country's 1993 abortion law - which allowed termination in a limited set of cases, including severe fetal abnormalities - remained in force during that period, and that A.R. had never actually been denied the procedure in Poland. Officials said she had taken her case to Strasbourg before fully using the domestic steps available to her.

The Strasbourg judges focused on what the situation looked like in real time and found that the uncertainty surrounding the law was the real problem. They said the system had become so unclear that even experienced doctors struggled to tell women with confidence what was still allowed.

"That prolonged confusion had direct and adverse consequences on the applicant's private life as she had been left in a state of ambiguity regarding her right to a legal abortion on the ground of fetal abnormalities. As a result of the uncertainty the applicant had been compelled to travel abroad for an abortion, which undoubtedly caused her significant additional stress," the court said.

The panel added that Polish authorities were responsible for providing clear, workable rules in such a sensitive area and failed to do so. While the judges did not question Poland's power to restrict abortion, they found that withholding publication of the Tribunal's ruling for months created a legal grey zone that left women without reliable guidance.

They also pointed back to M.L. v. Poland, a case where the Strasbourg court found that several judges on Poland's Constitutional Tribunal had been unlawfully appointed, meaning the 2020 panel was not a "tribunal established by law." 

That matters here because the same body that wiped out one of the few legal grounds for abortion was, in the court's view, operating without the basic rule-of-law safeguards a constitutional court should have. The ruling, the judges suggested, could hardly be separated from the broader turmoil already engulfing Poland's reproductive rights system.

The court ordered Poland to compensate A.R. for both financial and emotional harm - 1,495 euros (about $1,741) for documented costs such as medical care, travel and accommodation, and 15,000 euros for the distress caused by the ordeal. 

Agata Bzdyn-Lepucki, counsel for A.R., said she was "really happy that the ECHR found in favor of our client," adding that the ruling highlights Poland's continued failure to provide clear, workable standards on abortion under the Convention. She cautioned, however, that given the current political climate, "any legislative change in this area is likely impossible for now."

Polish authorities did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The judgment lands at a moment when Poland's abortion landscape is still deeply unsettled. The Constitutional Tribunal's 2020 ruling wiped out almost all legal access, leaving only cases of rape, incest or serious risk to the mother's life.

Poland's new centrist coalition has vowed to reverse course and even introduced bills allowing abortion on request up to 12 weeks. But the politics didn't move. The president at that time signaled he would not back major liberalization, and a deeply divided parliament failed to advance any reform. As of November 2025, the near-total ban shaped by the 2020 ruling remains effectively in place, leaving many women to travel abroad or rely on informal networks for care - a situation that has continued unchanged even under the country's newly elected president, Karol Nawrocki.

Atina Krajewska, a professor of law at Birmingham Law School, said the ruling will be "welcomed by the applicants and pregnant people in Poland who have suffered as a result of restrictive abortion law." She said the court's approach "sends a clear message that undermining the rule of law has direct consequences for the sexual and reproductive rights," but noted that the reasoning remains mostly procedural and that the judges "may have missed an opportunity to recognize the right to abortion" more clearly. 

Krajewska also added that this ruling "could signal a change" in how the court approaches abortion and broader reproductive justice cases, potentially pushing Strasbourg to examine the wider constitutional and institutional environment behind such restrictions. 

Still, she warned that without a clear acknowledgment by the court that criminalizing or limiting access to abortion can never be considered "necessary in a democratic society." "No pregnant person, or person who considers becoming pregnant, can feel entirely safe," she said.

Another scholar said the ruling's implications go even further.

"The practical effect for guaranteeing immediate access to safe reproductive health is limited unless domestic legal or administrative changes follow," said Agnieszka Kubal, a sociolegal professor at the University of Oxford.

The judgment also drew attention to the role of activists who helped bring these issues to Strasbourg. Karolina Kocemba, a sociolegal scholar and postdoctoral fellow at Erasmus University Rotterdam, said the case shows how coordinated legal action helped drive Poland's abortion restrictions onto the Strasbourg docket.

She pointed to the "Women's Complaint," a grassroots campaign run by FEDERA - a major Polish reproductive rights group - which posted a template application that "around a thousand women used" to file complaints. To her, the ruling "can be read as a success of legal mobilization aimed at defending women's rights," even if the court again avoided recognizing a standalone right to abortion and "focused mainly on constitutional and procedural issues."

The ruling is final unless either side asks for a Grand Chamber review within three months - a narrow window that will determine whether the case ends here or moves to Europe's highest bench.

Courthouse News reporter Eunseo Hong is based in the Netherlands.

Source: Courthouse News Service