Fact-check: is the Netherlands going to send abortion pills to women in Poland?
By Agata Pyka (tekst dostępny również w języku polskim)
In recent weeks, Polish abortion activists and many media outlets have circulated what seemed to be important news for Polish women.
They reported that the Dutch parliament has approved a new law allowing Polish citizens to have online consultations with Dutch doctors in order to receive prescriptions for abortion medication that can then be sent by post to Poland.
However, our fact-check with the Dutch health ministry and parliament debunks these claims.
A broad spectrum of Polish media have reported information about online abortion consultations with Dutch doctors. Major news website Onet and leading daily Rzeczpospolita wrote about the Netherlands wanting to “help Polish women” by “changing the law”.
Similar claims were echoed by a health and wellbeing website, Poradnik Zdrowie, which stated that “a new law was adopted in the Dutch parliament” and went on to explain that “it assumes that after medical teleconsultation, Polish women will be able to receive abortion pills from the Netherlands by post”.
Meanwhile, conservative Catholic outlets Radio Maryja and PCh24 warned about Dutch doctors “killing unborn Polish children” as “the Netherlands wants to facilitate Polish women’s access to abortion via teleconsultation”.
The media frenzy started on 24 April, when TVN – Poland’s largest private broadcaster – published an article titled “Dutch telemedicine for women from Poland? ‘The right to abortion should not be imposed by borders’”.
The outlet initially led with a claim that the Dutch parliament had just approved a new law that would allow Polish women to receive abortion pills by post from the Netherlands after an online consultation.
Recently, however, the article was edited. Even though TVN has not acknowledged on its page that such editing took place, we were able to access the changes by using the Wayback Machine, a digital archive of web pages on the internet.
TVN’s claims were toned down: the article now starts by informing that a debate was held in the Dutch parliament and that a new law benefiting Polish women might be introduced in the future.
But the initial version has already led to a wave of misinformation and no public correction has been issued by TVN. Moreover, despite the edits, the current version still contains misleading or untrue fragments. We contacted TVN for comment but received no response.
In order to verify the information, we contacted the Dutch health ministry and the MP responsible for the project in parliament. Contrary to TVN’s initial claims, no new law on this matter has been passed in the Netherlands.
Instead, on 8 April, the Dutch parliament debated a memorandum calling for “making it possible for doctors in the Netherlands to prescribe abortion medication to women in, for example, Poland, after an online consultation”, the Dutch health ministry told Notes from Poland.
Activists in some European countries have called for such measures to be introduced following the near-total ban on abortion that was introduced in Poland in 2021 and remains in place.
Parliament has voted for bills aimed at ending Poland’s near-total abortion ban to proceed to for further legislative work.
However, they still face a number of hurdles, including differences within the ruling coalition over how far to liberalise the law https://t.co/IIcMnvk0jZ
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) April 12, 2024
In the Dutch legal system, a memorandum allows MPs to raise a specific policy issue and make proposals about it, to which the government provides a response. Then, the memorandum is discussed by a relevant committee of the Tweede Kamer, the lower, more powerful house of the Dutch parliament.
The online abortion consultations memorandum was brought before the Tweede Kamer by Green-Left (GroenLinks) MP Elke Slagt-Tichelman. In a comment for Notes from Poland, the MP confirmed: “The initiative is not a law, and facilitates a respectful discussion in the parliament.”
Slagt-Tichelman also confirmed TVN’s claim that the debate in the Dutch parliament was held at the request of abortion activists from Women Help Women, a Polish abortion rights group, and the Abortion Without Borders (AWB) network.
Neither Women Help Women nor Aborcyjny Dream Team – a group helping Polish women seeking abortions abroad that is part of AWB and has shared TVN’s article on its Instagram – have replied to our requests for comment.
The introduction of a near-total abortion ban in Poland has not significantly reduced the number of women terminating pregnancies.
Instead, it has forced more to travel abroad to do so, as well as to seek mental health treatment back homehttps://t.co/i4XToJXQDf
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) July 9, 2021
After the presentation of the memorandum, two motions were raised in the parliament. The first one requested the government to exempt the remote provision of abortion pills from the existing legislation regulating all remote medical care.
The other motion called for the government to permit the digital provision of medication to patients in other EU member states only if those countries consider such actions as supportive of their own policies.
Both motions were meant to prevent doctors and pharmacists in the Netherlands from providing abortion medication through remote consultations to women in Poland, confirmed the Dutch ministry. However, they were rejected by a majority of MPs.
The debate around the memorandum and the rejection of the two motions trying to prohibit remote abortion consultations led to a misunderstanding in Polish media and the spread of an incorrect narrative that a new law had been passed in the Netherlands and its details would now be developed by Dutch doctors.
In reality, however, no law has been passed and the Dutch health ministry has denied there are plans to further discuss this issue in parliament.
Nevertheless, TVN’s article in its current form still claims that the debate held in the Dutch parliament may result in the passing of a new abortion law benefiting Polish women in the near future and that “detailed regulations are now to be drawn up by Dutch doctors”.
De abortuspil vanuit Nederland naar buitenlandse vrouwen? Kamermeerderheid ziet vooral bezwaren | de Volkskrant https://t.co/soaTsWAafZ
— Elke Slagt-Tichelman (@SlagtElke) April 8, 2024
Existing Dutch legislation provides scope for prescribing medication after an online consultation as long as certain conditions are met, which was confirmed to us by both the ministry and Slagt-Tichelman.
Introduced in April 2023, the “Prescribing via Internet” policy rule allows such prescriptions in accordance with the Dutch Medicines Act. The Termination of Pregnancy Act (Wafz) does not cover remote abortion care but does not prohibit it either.
“It is primarily up to abortion care providers to assess how they can provide responsible remote abortion care in a specific case,” explains the ministry.
But even though sending abortion medication by post is possible within the EU – which allows organisations such as Women Help Women and Aborcyjny Dream Team to help women in Poland – the Dutch health ministry highlighted that Dutch abortion care providers fear criminal prosecution for providing abortion care remotely to women abroad.
“We are not aware of any clinics that provide abortion medication from the Netherlands to women in Poland at this moment,” the ministry told us.
Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
Main image credit: Jakub Wlodek / Agencja Wyborcza.pl
Agata Pyka is an assistant editor at Notes from Poland. She is a journalist and a political communication student at the University of Amsterdam. She specialises in Polish and European politics as well as investigative journalism and has previously written for Euractiv and The European Correspondent.
