In Europe, abortion foes gain support, and funds

By Elisabeth Rosenthal International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, 2005

WARSAW For most of July, pedestrians in the Polish city of Lodz found themselves face-to-face with 14 grisly billboards pairing images of aborted fetuses with photographs of blood-spattered corpses – victims of genocide in Srebrenica or Rwanda, toddlers killed in the Oklahoma City bombing attack. Placed by a Polish anti-abortion group, the traveling exhibition, which has moved on to Lublin, personifies an aggressive, well-financed and growing conservative movement across Europe that opposes not only abortion but also contraception, sex education, artificial insemination and gay rights.

With friends like Anna Zaborska

Women who think Europe is a big yawn had better wake up before it’s too late

The Guardian, Mary-Ann Stephenson, Monday February 7, 2005

It’s always surprised me that British women are not more pro-European. In the run-up to European elections, women’s organisations run campaigns listing all the rights that have originated in the EU: equal pay for work of equal value, part-time workers’ rights, changes in parental leave and so on. But British women remain resolutely unengaged.

We may now be in danger of realising what we’ve got only when it’s gone. Female MEPs are warning of a backlash in the European parliament that they fear may stall, or even reverse, the progress on equality. Sadly, the Ukip MEP Godfrey “they don’t clean behind the fridge” Bloom is not the only member of the parliamentary women’s committee whose ideas about gender roles come straight from the 50s. Even more worryingly, one of the others is the committee chairwoman, Anna Zaborska.

Zaborska’s rise in EU parlt rattles leftists in Slovakia

A leadership position awarded last week by the European Parliament to one of Slovakia’s new European legislators has invigorated the country’s Christian right politicians and angered the Liberal left. The appointment of conservative MEP Anna Zaborska as chairwoman of the Strasbourg parliament’s Committee for Women’s Rights and Gender Equality has served to widen the gap between left and right at home in Bratislava.