Many women still take long, distressing and often expensive journeys in order to gain access to safe abortion due to restrictive legislation in their home countries. A reality for women around the world, from Kenya, Mexico, Poland or Ireland, these journeys are often referred to as "abortion tourism." 

There has always been "abortion tourism." In Europe, there are two states from which women are "escaping" to terminate a pregnancy. The first is Ireland. Representatives from IFPA and the Safe and Legal Abortion Rights Campaign in Ireland reported that 200 women travel each week to the United Kingdom from the Republic and Northern Ireland to have an abortion. Abortion remains illegal on both sides of the island's border, and the penalty for helping a woman obtain an abortion is life imprisonment.

Economics also plays a part here - Irish women making the trip have to find at least £1000 to pay for it, which is completed in secrecy and silence. Therefore, socio-economic status plays a huge role in whether a woman can access safe abortion. 

However, a trip abroad does not have to be more as expensive as some private Polish surgeries. Poland is the second European state where the "abortion tourism" exists. As already mentioned in a previous article (Even Legal Abortion Is Hard to Access in Poland), the anti-abortion law in Poland is one of the most restrictive in Europe. Therefore, Polish women very often look for a clinic in countries neighboring Poland, where it is much easier to get a safe abortion. These countries include Czech Republic, Germany or Ukraine. Just recently, Czech Republic's cabinet unanimously approved a bill that would extend abortion privileges and other health services to all European Union (EU) citizens (see: Czech Republic: Abortion Services Not "Abortion Tourism" for EU Citizens). 

The opponents to the bill claim that the new regulations will enable "abortion tourism" from the other European states where termination of pregnancy is restricted, and here Poland comes as a main example. 

It is difficult to measure the phenomenon in Poland, but it is still significant and growing, particularly after Poland's accession to the European Union, which has significantly increased the mobility of Polish women. The survey was undertaken by the Federation on Women and Family Planning in Poland, and included in the report entitled, Reproductive Rights in Poland: The Effects of the Anti-Abortion Law, showed that most often this is a dozen or so or several dozen cases annually. Abortion tourism has an individual character. It seems that organized abortion tourism does not currently exist on a large scale like it did in the early 90s, when there were agencies organizing trips for women to Belarus or to Russia for abortions. As a result of police operations, such agencies were liquidated. 

The recent article published in Kyiv Post by Yuliya Popova suggests evidence that Ukraine has become one of the countries Polish women go to terminate pregnancies. Petro Gusak from the Lviv Institute of Family and Married Life said, "It's an entire industry. There are special tourist buses that take Polish women in reproductive age across the border to see the doctors." 

Wanda Nowicka, Director of the Polish Federation for Women and Family Planning in Warsaw, said that women with higher income travel to EUcountries. Those earning much less go to Ukraine or Belarus. Many others buy special pills on the Web to abort a pregnancy at home. Nowicka, however, cannot produce any documented proof for Ukraine because "it's all done secretly," but, the article refers to Dr. Iryna Mykychak from the Lviv Regional Health Administration who denies any backstreet abortions in her district. "We have not had a single foreign woman seeking that service recently," she said. 

But, unofficially it is said that Ukrainian doctors do not deny anyone their services, performing at least 200,000 abortions for Ukrainian women and possibly another few thousand for the Polish "tourists." 

While the abortion opponents talk about abortion tourism, only the most privileged women can escape local pro-life laws. The rest, mostly poor and young women, simply suffer. They cannot find the money or the assistance to make such trips so they suffer the health consequences of unsafe and illegal abortions performed in their own countries.