I’m pretty sure that the majority of you are familiar with the current struggle in Poland with regard to the total abortion ban and may already wonder why I, a gender and social movements researcher, haven’t written about it on my blog so far. The main reason is that the problem is extremely complex and an analysis of the whole spectrum of initiatives, discourses and actors involved in this struggle is impossible to perform in one (user-friendly) blog post. Therefore, after weeks of wondering how to frame the problem, I decided to divide the story into pieces and elaborate on particular issues in separate posts. So today, please enjoy the pilot of this fascinating series, which consists of a very short summary of the 2016 events and an introduction of one of the actors I had a chance to write a paper on back in 2010. Continue reading →