Polish insurgents and luminaries of the national culture came to Siberia. There were also sent - to heavy labor and often to settle for life - doctors accused of aborting a fetus.
In modern times in Poland, abortion was subject to the same penalty as for infanticide:death. Only the first penal code in Poland, announced in Congress Poland in 1818, introduced "more modern" solutions. Interestingly, according to it, was primarily punished for women who committed an artificial miscarriage. She was facing 3-10 years of hard imprisonment . The person who, with her consent, performed the procedure (a doctor or midwife) risked only a maximum three-year stay in the home of improvement. Later the situation changed, because in the second half of the 19th century the doctor faced 4 to 6 years of hard labor. It meant nothing less than a deportation to Siberia . The court could additionally order the prisoner to live for life in the Asian backwoods.
Let us remind you that according to today's law, a pregnant woman does not bear any criminal liability, and a doctor may be imprisoned for several months or a maximum of several years. As you can see, the tsarist regulations, compared to the current ones, were draconianly strict, but they had one feature in common with the legislation of the Third Republic:they were, in fact, almost a dead law. Until the beginning of the 20th century, little was written about abortion in the Polish press, and abortion procedures were beyond any control. Cases were brought to court in the case of infrequent denunciations or when the woman undergoing the procedure died. Gazeta Sądowa Warszawska from 1896 explained that "it is a very widespread crime, but it gets away with impunity because the perpetrators share a common interest in keeping secrecy."
Stanisław Milewski, author of The intimate life of the former Warsaw , he found only a few articles about abortion in the nineteenth-century press. In his opinion, data on abortion was probably first published in "Kurier Warszawski" in 1855. The newspaper then reported that 6 people were sentenced for this crime - it is not known whether they were pregnant, midwives or doctors.
Warsaw around 1900.
The case from 1884 is better known. Then a certain midwife was denounced by a young widow and the wife of a former police janitor who lived with her. They accused the woman that:"in collusion with the doctor S. in the sight of unlawful advantages he deals with abortion". Investigators did not do much, because there were no witnesses. They only established that the different women had given birth with the help of this midwife, and the births ended happily. As a result, no penalty was issued, but only police supervision over the suspect was established for two years.
The real sensation, however, was the trial in 1896, which was conducted behind closed doors, because the case was - as Stanisław Milewski explains - for those times too morally sensitive . Then doctor J. Zajdowski, accused of abortion, was sentenced to 4 years of hard labor and life to live in Siberia . It is not known whether he ultimately ended up in the Urals, but this process, among other things, led to a wider discussion on abortion. Its punishability began to be questioned, in which the prominent journalist Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński was the leader. Since the relevant provision from the new code of 1903 was in fact a legal fiction, the discussion was rather sluggish. And it seems it still hasn't finished…