On Tuesday, 20 October 2026, the Sejm voted on two abortion bills. One, 233–203 with one abstention, would restore the severe fetal-abnormality ground. The other, 217–213 with three abstentions, would amend the Penal Code on assistance. Those are two votes, not a law in force. The Senate is next. President Karol Nawrocki has not signed.

Notes from Poland: the first bill would reverse, by statute, the effect of the 2020 Constitutional Tribunal ruling that removed fetal abnormality from the legal grounds and that entered force in January 2021. Today abortion is allowed when the pregnancy results from a crime or when it threatens the woman’s life or health. That is the law now, not the law tomorrow.

The second bill would partly decriminalise help with an unlawful abortion and would drop penalties in Article 152. FEDERA: the Sejm passed one bill in full 217–213–3 and the other, with amendments, 233–203–1. This is not abortion on request up to 12 weeks. NFP: KO and The Left have backed that wider option, but it was not the text voted on Tuesday as law.

On the second vote, 27 MPs did not take part, including ten from PiS, among them Jarosław Kaczyński. NFP: had they voted, the bill might have fallen. Fourteen PSL MPs, including Deputy Prime Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, voted against decriminalisation. Those are attendance facts, not a presidential veto.

Both texts go to the Senate. The upper house can propose amendments; it cannot block passage, NFP writes. Tusk’s coalition has an even larger majority there. After the final versions, the president can sign, veto, or ask the tribunal to test constitutionality. Nawrocki has not yet done any of those.

His chief of staff reiterated on Tuesday that the president “supports the protection of life from conception to natural death.” NFP: a veto is likely. Likely is not signed. Others, citing Reuters, call a veto almost certain. That is an expectation, not an act. FEDERA’s protests announced for 22 October are not the law.

Image: the Sejm plenary chamber, 17 June 2023, Andrzej Barabasz, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The chamber in 2023, not Tuesday’s vote.

Sources consulted: Parliament approves liberalisation of Poland’s abortion laws — Notes from Poland; The Sejm supports the decriminalization of abortion and the restoration of the fetal abnormality ground — FEDERA.