With vigils outside clinics, marches drawing 1000’s and groups of men kneeling to wish in public squares, religious and neo-conservative groups have been ramping up pressure to ban abortions in staunchly Catholic Croatia.
The fierce debate has fueled divisions within the European Union nation of about 3.9 million people where abortion stays legal but access to the procedure is usually denied, sending many ladies to neighboring Slovenia to finish a pregnancy.
The movement is in stark contrast to Croatia’s recent past, when it was a part of the previous Yugoslavia, a Communist-run country that protected abortion rights in its structure 50 years ago.
“I find it incredible that we’re even discussing this within the yr 2024,” said Ana Sunic, a mother of two from Zagreb, Croatia’s capital. “It is one and all’s basic right to come to a decision what they’ll do with their body.”
The issue was back in focus this month after France inscribed the precise to abortion in its structure and activists within the Balkans recalled that the previous Yugoslavia had done so back in 1974.
Tanja Ignjatovic from the Belgrade-based Autonomous Women’s Center in Serbia, one other country that was once a part of Yugoslavia, noted that girls felt abortion rights “belonged to us and will not be brought into query.” But, she added, “we’ve seen that regression is feasible, too.”
After Yugoslavia disintegrated in a series of wars within the Nineties, the brand new countries that emerged kept the old laws in place. However, the post-Communist revival of nationalist, religious and conservative sentiments have threatened that legacy.
Yugoslavia’s abortion laws stayed intact after Croatia split from the country in 1991, but doctors were granted the precise to refuse to perform them in 2003. As a result, many ladies have traveled to neighboring Slovenia for an abortion over time.
“The gap between laws and practice is big,” feminist activist Sanja Sarnavka said. “Due to the immense influence by conservative groups and the Catholic church it (abortion) is de facto unattainable in lots of places, or severely restricted.”
A current campaign by a Za Zivot — “for all times” — movement in Croatia includes prayers, vigils and lectures “for the salvation of the unborn and a stop to abortions in our nation.”
A men’s organization dubbed Muzevni Budite, or “be masculine,” is behind the prayers in city squares, where they preach the revival of male dominance and traditional gender roles together with a campaign against abortions.
In 2022, the weekslong ordeal of a girl who had been denied an abortion despite the fact that her child had serious health problems caused an uproar and triggered protests in Croatia’s liberal community.
Mirela Cavajda was 20 weeks pregnant when doctors informed her that her fetus had a brain tumor and no probability of a standard life. Though the abortion was eventually permitted in Croatia, Cavajde had it performed in Slovenia.
As many as 207 Croatian women traveled to a single border hospital in Slovenia that very same yr for the procedure, a study by Croatian obstetrician Jasenka Grujić showed.
The percentage of doctors who refuse to perform abortions as conscientious objectors reaches 100% in some Croatian hospitals, the study found. The objectors include not only obstetricians but in addition anaesthesiologists and other doctors needed for the procedure, Grujic said.
“Croatia’s medical community is deeply divided,” Grujic wrote within the evaluation she made available to The Associated Press. “I hope this trend of actual unavailability of abortion will probably be reversed. That is so dangerous for ladies’s health and lives.”
Yugoslav physicians first considered legalizing abortion back in 1935, and that became a reality within the Fifties. Pushed forward by a women’s organization born out of World War II, the precise to abortion was later included in Yugoslavia’s structure.
Stating that “it’s the precise of a human being to freely choose the birth of youngsters,” Yugoslavia’s structure didn’t explicitly guarantee abortion, as France’s does. But it nonetheless gave Yugoslav women easy accessibility to terminate pregnancies in clinics throughout the previous six-member federation.
“France’s decision reminded us that we had that right within the 1974 structure, which implies exactly 50 years before France,” Ignjatovic said.
Elsewhere in the previous Yugoslavia, Serbia and Slovenia have included the liberty to decide on whether to have children of their constitutions. Bosnia’s women can legally obtain abortion throughout the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, though economic impediments exist within the impoverished, post-war country.
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Gec reported from Belgrade, Serbia. Associated Press writers Sabina Niksic in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and Predrag Milic in Podgorica, Montenegro, contributed to this report.
