The death of the mother followed her doctor’s decision not to abort her child. The protests led the nation’s health minister to say that Polish law allows abortions when a mother’s life is in danger.

(In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae [The Gospel of Life], Pope St. John Paul II taught, “It is true that the decision to have an abortion is often tragic and painful for the mother, insofar as the decision to rid herself of the fruit of conception is not made for purely selfish reasons or out of convenience, but out of a desire to protect certain important values such as her own health or a decent standard of living for the other members of the family. . . . Nevertheless, these reasons and others like them, however serious and tragic, can never justify the deliberate killing of an innocent human being.”)