Since late 2024, Poland has witnessed a further intensification of anti-choice activity, with two of the country’s most entrenched conservative organizations—Fundacja Życie i Rodzina (Life and Family Foundation) and the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture—at the center of the campaign. Their methods diverge, yet their ambitions remain unified: the dismantling of reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ protections, and the foundations of a pluralist, secular democracy. These recent months in Poland, a country known as the litmus paper for the far-right activity in the region, reflects a growing trend across Europe—a strategic, well-funded and transnational campaign to reverse decades of progress on gender equality and bodily autonomy.
What Poland is experiencing forms part of what experts have identified as a continent-wide shift. According to the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF) and their 2025 report, The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism Is Reclaiming Power, Europe is undergoing an orchestrated anti-gender backlash, driven by a coalition of ideologues, political actors, and transnational religious interests. This anti-rights movement has mobilized over $1.18 billion across the continent between 2019 and 2023, with Poland alone receiving over $90 million in documented anti-gender funding during that time. The report describes an increasingly professionalized infrastructure: legal foundations disguised as think tanks, media networks channeling ultra-conservative narratives, and Church-organized NGOs offering ideological services under the pretext of care.
Fundacja Życie i Rodzina, led by an anti-abortion activist Kaja Godek, continues to act as the symbolic and tactical face of Poland’s anti-choice movement. In early 2025, it launched a protest campaign against a newly opened meet-up spot for women undergoing a medical abortion in Warsaw. Publicized as a national call to action, the campaign involved daily picketing and emotional appeals coordinated through Catholic and far-right media. This mobilization was a meticulously orchestrated campaign designed to stigmatize abortion and intimidate. The visual tactics—graphic banners and emotional rhetoric—are as theatrical as they are strategic, evoking shame and fear as tools of persuasion.[AL1]
But Fundacja Życie i Rodzina has not stopped at that, contrarily – the campaign was an interlude to an intensification of the messaging on other areas of reproductive health. Between April and June, it led an aggressive social media campaign targeting in vitro fertilization, portraying it as a form of eugenics through the hashtag #InVitroToSelekcja (#IVFIsSelection). Weekly videos on Facebook and Instagram spread disinformation and amplified moral panic, while petitions circulated to local governments seeking to defund fertility services. This was not mere advocacy but a disinformation strategy dressed as morality, one that preys on anxieties and cloaks its intent in pseudo-scientific authority.
The foundation’s activism also targeted education and cultural spaces. Its “Ambassador of Life” program trained a substantial number of volunteers in ideological mobilization, leading to public demonstrations across Polish cities. Bloody banners depicting dismembered fetuses were not only deployed in Polish but, chillingly, also in Ukrainian—a move signaling that refugee populations are now being drawn into the scope of anti-choice campaigns. An echo of the from the Foundation’s campaign from 2022, when Ukrainian war refugees were handed disinformative leaflets about abortion in Poland as the traumatised women and children had crossed the border seeking safety. Moreover, in June 2025 Życie i Rodzina submitted a request to host a “Stop LGBT” exhibition in the Polish Sejm, an effort to normalize exclusionary ideology within the very heart of democratic representation. While not associated with Życie i Rodzina personally, it is worth to mention that the infamous Polish far-right MEP, Grzegorz Braun, had destroyed an exhibition dedicated to the LGBTQ+ in Poland in celebration of Pride Month, presented in the Sejm.
While Życie i Rodzina garners attention through street-level spectacle, Ordo Iuris focuses on legal warfare and institutional capture. Since late 2024, it has published a series of ideological policy papers designed to erode democratic norms under the guise of legal reform. Its November 2024 document, a 26-point denunciation of the EU’s Migration Pact, painted humanitarian policy as a threat to Polish sovereignty. In January, the group redirected its critique toward climate policy, framing the European Green Deal as an assault on traditional family life. By mid-year, it escalated further with a 57-page indictment of the Tusk government, accusing it of violating constitutional norms in a move intended to discredit democratic reforms as autocratic overreach.
Beyond publications, Ordo Iuris has moved to restrict personal freedoms through legislation. It issued a legal opinion supporting the right of pharmacists to deny emergency contraception and reintroduced a bill that would eliminate legal gender recognition for minors—a measure backed by 25 MPs. If enacted, it would make legal and medical transitions for youth impossible, part of a broader effort to erase trans people from public life. This strategy of preemptive legalism is central to the anti-rights project: building a normative and institutional landscape hostile to difference, autonomy, and dissent.
In June 2025, Ordo Iuris escalated its institutional strategy by publishing Wielki Reset: Przywracanie suwerenności państw członkowskich w Unii Europejskiej (The Great Reset: Reinstating the European Union Member States’ Sovereignity), a manifesto co-authored with Hungary’s ultraconservative Mathias Corvinus Collegium. The document outlines two radical reform scenarios for dismantling the European Union’s current supranational framework. It argues that EU institutions have overstepped their legal mandates, accusing them of ideological colonization and democratic illegitimacy. Through proposals that include eliminating the primacy of EU law, weakening the European Parliament, replacing the European Commission with a technocratic secretariat, and restoring national constitutions as ultimate legal authorities, the report aims to normalize the rejection of European integration as a defense of “sovereignty.” This call for a “new Europe” steeped in nationalist governance and ideological rollback reveals Ordo Iuris’s ambitions not only to reshape Poland’s legal order, but to redefine the architecture of European cooperation itself. The publication marks a significant convergence of Poland’s ultra-conservative legal activism with Hungary’s authoritarian intellectual export model, framing democratic backsliding as institutional reform.
None of these developments occur in a vacuum. According to The Next Wave report, Poland is but one battleground in a Europe-wide reactionary surge. The movement draws strength from coalitions that span denominations, borders, and party lines. Actors like Ordo Iuris are embedded in networks such as the global Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) alliance, which supports affiliated organizations from France to Brazil. The report also documents how ultra-conservative media platforms, pseudo-academic think tanks, and Church-organized NGOs form an ecosystem designed to launder religious ideology into secular policy.
The rise of such actors is made possible by transnational funding and the co-option of democratic institutions. The largest share of anti-gender funding in Europe—over $339 million—goes to lobbying organizations, many of which explicitly target reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights. Poland’s place in this architecture is both as a recipient and an exporter of regressive strategies. The Rev. Piotr Skarga Christian Culture Association, for example, based in Kraków, is a central node in the European TFP network and one of its most influential funders.
This is not simply a cultural shift; it is a strategic, material, and ideological project aimed at consolidating power. It is often cloaked in the language of tradition, family, and freedom, yet what it delivers is coercion, exclusion, and repression. While Życie i Rodzina galvanizes public sentiment through moral panic, Ordo Iuris crafts the legal scaffolding to enshrine inequality. Together, they are reshaping Poland’s cultural and legal landscape in ways that may prove harder to reverse than any singular legislative loss.
Despite the absence of landmark new laws in 2025, the conditions for future repression are being steadily constructed. From legislative drafts to street intimidation, these organizations are creating a climate in which repressive laws become thinkable, palatable, and eventually inevitable. It is a war of attrition: waged in the courts, on the airwaves, in schools, and on the sidewalks.
At the Foundation for Women and Family Planning (FEDERA), we remain committed to resisting this wave. We continue to monitor, expose, and confront these threats with evidence, advocacy, and solidarity. As the anti-choice movement evolves and embeds itself more deeply into the European political mainstream, our resistance must be equally strategic, persistent, and uncompromising. The struggle for dignity, autonomy, and equality is not merely one of policy—it is a defense of the future itself.
Foundation FEDERA extends her thanks to the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, along with Neil Datta, the author of “The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism Is Reclaiming Power”.
Author: Antonina Lewandowska
