"I had to come for my own conscience, and I had to come for the sake of my children," said the mother of four, kneeling on the cold pavement in prayer. "I've always considered the commandment, 'Thou shall not kill,' something that cannot be interpreted in any other way."
Wilk was among the tens of thousands of Poles who came to the capital yesterday to protest parliamentary plans to liberalize the country's 3-year-old abortion law, the most restrictive among former East Bloc countries and second in all of Europe in its stringency only to Ireland.
The Polish parliament is expected to vote on the proposed amendments today, and yesterday's demonstration was the latest in a series of highly charged protests that have attracted hundreds of thousands of ordinary Poles over the past two months.
The crux of the abortion dispute is about competing claims of a woman's right to choose and society's right to protect its unborn. In Poland, the debate has also become a lightning rod for one of the country's major unresolved issues since the end of communism: How Roman Catholic do Poles want their new country to be?
"The time has come for Catholics in Poland to rethink their attitudes," said Wilk, 38, who deemed the rally yesterday so important that she pulled three of her children out of school and brought her toddler along as well. "I want my children to see a different Poland."
Since the fall of communism seven years ago, abortion has been among the hottest, most divisive issues in Poland, where more than 90 percent of the people are nominally Catholic and most regularly attend Sunday mass. Passage of the present law - which permits abortions only in rare cases such as rape, incest and danger to the life of the mother - was a key achievement of the Solidarity governments that ruled until 1993, reversing a Communist-era law that made abortions freely available.
But the debate has taken on unprecedented virulence and urgency since the election last year of President Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former Communist who has had a rocky relationship with church officials. Unlike Lech Walesa, his devout Catholic predecessor, Kwasniewski has made it clear he will not veto abortion-rights legislation or oppose secularization of Polish laws, including a new constitution that some want to be free of any reference to a supreme being.
"The current law has caused much social harm and human suffering," said Izabella Sierakowska, a Kwasniewski ally speaking yesterday in parliament. "We cannot pretend that there is no problem, no 'abortion tourism' (to neighboring countries) or underground, that there are no abandoned infants."
The bill would allow pregnancies to be terminated by women "who find themselves in difficult living conditions or where they have other important personal reasons," but only after undergoing counseling and waiting three days to reconsider. It would also step up sex education in schools and lower the price of contraceptives.
As a testament to the groundswell of anti-abortion opposition, a vote that a few weeks ago was seen as a sure win for abortion-rights supporters is now considered a close call, even though public opinion polls have consistently shown a majority of Poles favor liberalizing the law.
Abortion-rights activists have tried to respond with counter-demonstrations, but there is no tradition for such activism and many women are still reluctant to do so publicly.
defy the church.
"There is very strong pressure, one can feel it everywhere," said legislator Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka, author of the proposed changes. "I only hope the new law is going to pass. I hope the members of parliament are not going to give in to the pressure."
The world's most famous and influential Pole, Pope John Paul II, has even weighed in on the anguished debate, twice appealing to his fellow countrymen to reject the changes.
In a message read to 100,000 pilgrims gathered last month in Czestochowa, the holiest of Polish shrines, the pontiff said he was filled with pain at the prospect of "defenseless human beings" being denied the right to life in his very own homeland.
AP PHOTO
Some 40,000 Poles marched through downtown Warsaw yesterday to protest the liberalization of the country's strict anti-abortion law.