A large colour photograph of John Paul II greets women in the waiting room of a family planning clinic in a small Polish town. Poland is a primary political crusade of his pontificate, and the new state there has repaid him by repealing all but the most restrictive of its reproductive laws.
If you want to define yourself as a good Polish citizen, being a good Catholic is a quick way to demonstrate it. Poland is seen as a model of good Catholic reproductive practice. It may well have been cited by bishops attending the Episcopal Conference in Maynooth.
Alliances between Polish nationalists and the church resulted in changes to abortion laws in 1994 and 1998. The official number of legal abortions fell from 3,047 in 1997 to only 310 in 1998, with the latter restricted to the most extreme circumstances. Would that Ireland could follow the same route, some might say: Irish abortion figures now exceed 6,000, with health workers estimating the real figures at almost double. The uniquely Irish culture of late abortions is becoming international news.
But this week non-governmental Polish family planning agencies published alternative abortion figures, based on reviews of private clinics, women's testimony and healthcare workers' statistics. The number reached 80,000, a figure supported by other trends, such as live births being at their lowest since the second World War.
Much as the Pope may like to praise the new Poland, it is clear that something is very, very wrong. Conflicting statistics raise dark and difficult questions about the long-term merits of imposing fundamentalist ideologies on human reproductive behaviour.
Official lists show what anti-abortionists call progress. Behind the holy curtain, the reality is dangerous. Funds ploughed in by international anti-abortion agencies such as Human Life International, which sought Irish sponsors for the Polish programmes through the pages of the Irish Catholic, paid for advertising and pamphlet campaigns. People began to tell non-governmental family planning agencies their fears of being reported to the local priest.
MAJOR increases in the price of oral contraceptives, with simultaneous reductions in sex and relationships education in schools, made discussion of sex, the body and reproductive health taboo. The result is to make Poland a superficially anti-abortion place, where many doctors invoked conscience clauses against performing abortions even in life-threatening situations, but where some continued to perform procedures in private clinics, charging in 1997 values an average of $400 for an early termination: this when the average monthly wage was $300.
The situation was ripe for financial abuse. The number of private abortions and a growing abortion travel industry meant desperate people could easily be exploited. And people are desperate.
Some take drastic measures, because the cost of private abortion is now so high. A mother of three children died in an improvised abortion attempt when her husband injected penicillin into her vagina, with her consent. The couple could not afford another child.
Public healthcare regulations are not enforced in private clinics as they were in public hospitals. Old instruments, some reportedly 40 years old, are used on women who have neither a right of protest nor a pathway for doing so.
Meanwhile, Poland's reputation as a model of good Catholic practice grows and grows. Overall, the rising influence of the Roman Catholic Church has been accompanied by a parallel rise in nationalism, unregulated capitalism, and increasing moves to limit reproductive rights.
Devaluing reproductive rights automatically devalues the status of women: once their status is damaged, the status of children collapses too. Worldwide evidence links women's status and their poverty to the status and poverty of children.
That trend is now visible within the eastern bloc, where a combination of the rise of freemarket materialism and attempts to negate human reproductive rights are having shocking effects on child poverty, as this week's European Children's Trust report indicates. Children in the former eastern bloc are now almost as disadvantaged as children in Africa.
Where life is plentiful, it can be cheap. The world's most restrictive abortion laws apply to only 25 per cent of its population, living mainly in Africa, Latin America - and Ireland. Such countries also have low proportions of women in public life and high rates of child poverty.
NO ONE in the Vatican is wringing their hands at the deepening human crises caused by official restrictions on abortion in Poland. Like the Holocaust that took place in the ghettoes of Warsaw, in concentration camps all over the country, the reality of so many abortions can be denied because it does not show up in official figures.
Countries once dominated by Catholic thinking, such as Portugal, Spain and France, now operate safe, early abortion procedures, without expecting the Catholic population to compromise their faith. If Catholics do, they are automatically excommunicated by the Vatican, an outcome other sinners such as paedophiles or mass murderers do not have to face.
A 15-year-old girl who had been raped by her father, and fallen pregnant as a result, was among the first people to receive a safe legal abortion in Portugal. But the Bishops' Conference there opposed it.
Rather than terminate the pregnancy, they argued, the girl should have been enabled to realise her "martyrdom." A holy fate, no doubt. This is the holy curtain behind which some fundamentalist Catholics want Ireland to remain also. But reality suggests the curtain is in tatters: too many martyrs, too many undisclosed.
mruane@irish-times.ie