Far-right European Parliament lawmaker and long-shot Polish presidential candidate Grzegorz Braun is facing a potential investigation after he stormed a hospital on Wednesday and threatened a doctor with a citizen’s arrest for performing a legal late-term abortion.
Gizela Jagielska said she was signing some administrative documents when a crowd of about 30 men, led by Braun, burst into the hospital around 11 a.m. She said the men surrounded her, stopped her from leaving and told her she should be arrested.
“He insulted me, he called me a serial murderer,” Jagielska told POLITICO, describing Braun’s actions, which have been condemned by both the Polish justice minister and the country’s equality minister.
“He pushed me when I wanted to get out of the room.”
In a video posted by the lawmaker, Braun said he was at the Oleśnica District Hospital to arrest Jagielska after she performed an abortion on a fetus with rare skeletal dysplasia, which severely endangered the life of the mother.
The member of the European Parliament can be seen entering the hospital, flashing his European Parliament badge. Declaring he would enact a “citizen’s arrest” for the “crime of taking a life,” Braun followed Jagielska around the office asking the other men to call the police.
The far-right, independent MEP, who is running in the May Polish presidential election, is not new to controversy, both in Brussels and at home. He famously disrupted a minute of silence during a special plenary session to remember Holocaust victims, used a fire extinguisher to vandalize a menorah lit for Hanukkah in the Polish parliament, and vandalized a Christmas tree adorned with baubles bearing EU and Ukrainian flags.
He was joined by Polish MP Roman Fritz, in what he on social media called a “parliamentary intervention.”
On Thursday, the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Wrocław announced it will open an investigation into the incident at the hospital.
POLITICO reached out to Braun but did not hear back by the time of publication.
Jagielska said performing abortions in Poland has always been hard, but things have gotten more difficult in recent years.
The far-right nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) government ruled Poland from 2015 to 2023, tightening the country’s already very restrictive abortion rules. In 2020, they enabled a near-total ban on abortion, allowing the procedure only in cases of rape or incest, or if the life of the woman is endangered. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s new government has attempted to ease the strict regulations but has encountered stiff opposition.
“There is much politics in it,” Jagielska said. “Politicians changed but it didn’t help much.”
Still, government officials were quick to denounce the MEP’s actions.
Braun’s behavior “exceeds all ethical and perhaps also legal boundaries” and “the prosecutor’s office must react quickly and firmly,” Polish Justice Minister Adam Bodnar said Thursday.
For two hours, the men surrounded Jagielska, she said, preventing her from doing her job.
“These are acts of terror against patients, doctors, and hospital administrators,” Poland’s Minister for Equality Katarzyna Kotula told the TVN24 news channel.
Jagielska is not new to abortion protesters. As a doctor performing abortions in one of the countries with the strictest abortion laws in Europe, she has seen her fair share of pro-life demonstrations and online hate.
Her hospital attracts crowds of pro-lifers at least once or twice a week, she said. But on Wednesday things escalated beyond anything she had experienced before.
“We have had many, many pro-life demonstrations in front of the hospital for years, but it never has happened that those people came to the hospital,” she said.
Police said they were called to the scene when “a group of unauthorized people entered the hospital” and “disturbed the operation of the medical facility and the peace of patients,” they said in a post on social media.
Eventually, police convinced the men to leave.
“The scariest part was that I was trapped in the upper room, and downstairs there were pregnant women, there were women in the delivery room, and I couldn’t get back to see what was happening in the ward,” said Jagielska.
Bartosz Brzeziński contributed reporting.
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