Together with targeting Sunday shoppers, the Church has continued its campaign against women and their reproductive health. Even before its faithful servant Lech Walesa swept into office, a Church-sponsored initiative succeeded in outlawing abortions that were available under the communist government. Because labor protections have almost disappeared in the new market economy, women who do bear children frequently lose their jobs because of work absence and their families sink into greater poverty. Another proposed law would ban pre-natal examinations entirely. The Church's self-proclamation as the Great Defender of Human Life resolves into mere words shouted from the pulpit.
Words cost nothing.
At the century's end, a regressive theopolitics has seized the country, one that tells Poles to accept their miseries and pain, and that specifies God's will as the reason for poverty and income inequalities. Sexuality and the elaboration of a divine morality have become religious cudgels for social control. The power to make desire legitimate or illegitimate is one of the Church's greatest skills. Desire is the point where the material and the emotional meet to emerge as the conditions of life. Desire is the point where the Church searches for its instruments of control.