Protesting under Lockdown: how Polish abortion rights protest takes on a new form of Civil Disobedience?

The recent reports by Civicus Monitor, Freedom House, and Amnesty International show that fundamental rights and freedoms have been deteriorated due to Covid-19 measures in almost every country in the world in 2020. Some governments used pandemics as an excuse to restrain the freedoms (free speech, peaceful assembly, and freedom of association), which are the first targets when the question is public safety yet, they failed to keep the balancing rights. Another group of governments misused the health emergency to interfere with related fundamental rights (right to life, rights of minorities, anti-discrimination, rights to elect and to be elected). All these policies of the governments gave rise to mass civil disobedience protests around the world. These acts of civil disobedience showed themselves as breaking the anti-pandemic measures of governments to demonstrate their protests indirectly against the governments’ unjust policies. The article is a preliminary study on conceptualizing those indirect forms of civil disobedience among the numerous other protests. The research will specifically focus on the main developments in abortion rights’ protests against the laws/norms put in place in Poland through the prism of indirect civil disobedience. This paper stresses how the actions of abortion rights protestors are the perfect example of indirect civil disobedience protests marked the year 2020. By interpretations of well-known definitional elements of civil disobedience given by J. Rawls, H. Bedau, and K. Brownlee, the study analyzes the unique features of this act of civil disobedience by the people who use their physical presence to call for a legal change. The study accepts disobedience as a structurally open-ended concept destined to remain an essentially contested concept. Therefore, it adds up the modern features Polish protests bring along themselves that are not explainable via traditional interpretation of civil disobedience.