POLAND'S left-dominated lower house of parliament voted yesterday to liberalise the country's abortion law in a measure denounced by the Catholic Church as complicity in a monstrous crime.
The house voted by 208 to 61 with 15 abstentions in favour of amendments to the restrictive 1993 anti-abortion law, which will let women end pregnancies before the 12th week if they are too poor to raise a child or have other personal problems.
The vote, a blow to Polish-born Pope John Paul II, provoked instant condemnation from the Catholic episcopate, which had rallied political allies and believers to oppose the measure.
"The lower house . . . is simply lending its hand to a monstrous crime which will be carried out in the full majesty of the law on tens or hundreds of thousands of human beings," a spokesman, Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek, said in a statement.
He appealed to doctors and nurses to boycott abortions, which the church equates with killing.
The present law, passed under a previous centre-right government, allows abortions only if pregnancy threatens a woman's life or health, results from rape or incest, or when the foetus is irreparably damaged.
Supporters of the change say the current law leads to many personal tragedies, bungled back-street abortions and abandoned babies.
There has been a thriving business in abortion tours to neighbouring countries for those women with enough money.
"Liberalisation does not prevent believers from living according to their religious principles," leftist deputy Danuta Waniek, a backer of the move, told PAP news agency.
Parliament passed similar amendments in 1994 but they were vetoed by the then president, Mr Lech Walesa, a devout Catholic.
Mr Walesa lost the elections last year to former communist Mr Aleksander Kwasniewski, who has said he will sign the new law after it clears the Senate.
Several deputies said their votes had been wrongly recorded by parliament's computerised system and the Deputy Speaker, Mr Marek Borowski, said he would consider a possible recount.
Some other parliamentary opponents of the Bill, who led a mass walk-out from the chamber in hopes of preventing a quorum, said they would appeal against the Bill.
Pope John Paul branded abortion a terrible crime yesterday, hours after Poland voted to liberalise its abortion laws.
The Pope told a delegation of bishops from Thailand that families in their dioceses needed special pastoral care in the face of growing materialism which he said, was alien to Thai culture.