Paweł Łącki

The text aims at reconstructing the structure of the arguments of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal in the judgment of 22 October 2020, in which the so-called eugenic grounds for termination of pregnancy were held unconstitutional. The assumption of the presented considerations is the recognition that this judgment amounts to be a possible and natural development of jurisprudence regarding the disputed constitutional issue. The authors argue that the essential structural elements of the Tribunal’s reasoning (i.e. its two-stage nature consisting in examining the constitutional subjectivity of the nasciturus and carrying out the proportionality test) do not raise objections in the light of the method of resolving the constitutional problem adopted by the Constitutional Tribunal. In turn, the partial conclusions of these argumentation stages (i.e. recognition of the subjectivity of the nasciturus on the basis of Article 38 of the Constitution regulating the legal protection of life, as well as the recognition that the challenged regulation does not meet the proportionality test) are based on the existing doctrinal stipulations, and even more so on the existing jurisprudence of the Tribunal. The judgment is largely of an application nature in relation to the fundamental findings of the Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling of 28 May 1997, but these findings are embedded in other constitutional categories: the life of a nasciturus is not only recognized as a “constitutional value” detached from the subject, but as a good an entity who entitled to the constitutional right to legal protection of life. In turn, the decisions of the ordinary legislator as to the intensity and type of this protection must meet the requirements of proportionality test, taking into account the constitutional importance of the right to legal protection of life and its close connection with the protection of human dignity.