Search the internet in Croatia for abortion clinics and the top result on Google appears, at first glance, to be a website offering information to women about the procedure.
But klinikazapobacaje.com is in reality part of a nationwide campaign aimed at discouraging women from terminating their pregnancies.
Women who abort, the website claims, risk depression, sexual dysfunction, cancer, drug addiction and suicidal thoughts.
One of the phone numbers it lists is for Meri Bilic, a woman who works at the Bethlehem Centre for Unborn Life, one of five facilities across Croatia offering refuge to pregnant women driven by family or financial circumstances to consider a termination. In exchange for keeping the foetus, the centres offer free board and lodging for a year.
Bilic and the Bethlehem centres are part of a growing movement to end abortion in predominantly Catholic Croatia, where the right to a termination has been enshrined in law for decades but increasingly difficult for women to access.
The newest member of the European Union, Croatia has one of the lowest rates of abortion in Europe. The numbers have fallen dramatically since the country broke away from Yugoslavia in the 1990s, during a war that reawakened a sense of national identity rooted for many Croatians in their Catholic faith.
A recent investigation suggests the official figures do not tell the whole story.
Fearing stigma and blocked by a large number of doctors who refuse to perform abortions in public hospitals on the grounds of their faith, many Croatian women are forced to have unregistered terminations in private clinics.
Pregnant women who seek help as a result of family or financial problems are often directed by the state to Catholic-run shelters, which in Bethlehem’s case can mix warnings of damnation with promises of salvation. With the rise to power in 2016 of a conservative government, the legal right to choose abortion is now under direct threat, echoing developments in Poland in October where only mass protests halted parliament from instituting a near-total ban on the procedure.
It has parallels, too, with moves in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia to restrict abortion, and in Kosovo, where social stigma is fuelling illegal terminations.
“The position of women in society is … under threat [and] becoming the space where an ideological battle is being fought for the profile of Croatian society,” said Croatian sociologist Valerija Barada.
In 1980, according to the World Health Organisation, there were 701 abortions per 1,000 live births in Croatia, then part of a socialist Yugoslav federation where abortion rates were generally high.
The figure began falling rapidly with the outbreak of war in 1991 when Croatia declared independence, and by 2014 had dropped to 76 per 1,000 live births, the lowest rate in the Balkan region, compared with 156 in Albania, 168 in Montenegro, 195 in Slovenia, 201 in Macedonia, 259 in Serbia, 401 in Romania and 416 in Bulgaria.
A general fall in eastern Europe is partly explained by the more widespread use of effective contraception. But in Croatia there are other reasons too, rooted in a rise in “traditional values”.
Today, abortions in Croatia are allowed at public hospitals and one private clinic in the capital, Zagreb. But of 375 doctors certified to carry out the procedure, just over half refuse to do so on the basis of a 2003 law that introduced the right to conscientious objection, according to a 2014 report by the ombudsperson for gender equality.
Critics say the right to object is poorly regulated, leaving some areas of the country with barely any doctors prepared to carry out abortions.
The story of Sani, who asked for her surname not be used, is not unusual. When she became pregnant in 2011 aged 18, the public hospital in Split told her none of its doctors performed abortions. So Sani called her gynaecologist. “She told me she’s bringing babies on to the earth, not killing them,” Sani said.
Finally, Sani told her boyfriend’s parents, who arranged an abortion with a doctor in a private clinic. On Sani’s medical record, the termination is recorded as a miscarriage. She paid €340, more than twice the official average in public hospitals. Such “hidden abortions” almost certainly account for the fact that while the number of legal abortions has fallen rapidly, the proportion of terminations registered as occurring for medical reasons more than doubled, from 21% to 48%, between 1998 and 2014, according to state statistics.
This shift tallies with a broader shift in public discourse, in which women who terminate a pregnancy are vilified.
In May, up to 10,000 people took part in a rally in Zagreb called March for Life, proclaiming the sanctity of the family. At the head of the march was the conservative movement’s most prominent leader, Željka Markić. Next to her was Sanja Orešković, the wife of the then prime minister, Tihomir Orešković.
“Every reasonable person will choose life over death, and everything else is just nonsense and fear,” Orešković told reporters.
It was the first march of its kind in Croatia, and a sign of the times.
In October, the Catholic anti-abortion activist group 40 Days for Life published on Facebook a call to prayer outside a hospital in the eastern town of Vukovar where, it had learned, a woman was due to have an abortion the next day.
The hospital ordered an internal investigation and the state attorney’s office ordered its own inquiry amid uproar among rights groups over the leaking of confidential medical details.
Fighting ‘violence and lies’
Catholic clergyman Pater Marko Glogović opened the first Bethlehem house in 2010 in the town of Karlovac. The organisation now offers accommodation for 19 women and their children for up to a year.
Glogović said Karlovac centre alone had given shelter to 70 pregnant women who had agreed to go through with their pregnancy. It has received more than €300,000 from unspecified donors over the past three years, according to financial reports filed at the ministry of finance.
“In general we are always full, but since mothers sometimes stay only a short time, we can always take in new ones,” Glogović said.
He added that he had nothing to do with the abortion clinic website, but supported its intentions. “I did not encourage or create, nor am I the editor of this site, but I certainly give them my blessing as they are a symbol of the David versus Goliath fight against lies and violence towards women and children,” he said.
Silvija Stanić, who runs an organisation called Step by Step, which offers counselling and psychological support to young pregnant women, said she did not have any direct experience with Bethlehem but had reservations about its message.
“What I have heard about Bethlehem is that it’s a house for women to give birth in. If the alternative to sleeping under a bridge is an institution where she has a roof over her head, of course it is a rescue. But I wonder, at what price?
“The separation of religious principles from the state … is extremely important, but it’s not happening in this case. This is experimentation with a person’s life,” Stanić said.
Nevertheless, Bethlehem says it regularly receives referrals from the authorities. “Doctors and nurses will let us know if a girl needs help,” said Blaženka Bakula, the head of the Bethlehem house in Zagreb. The house she runs, she added, had “wonderful cooperation” with the Centre for Social Welfare, the main state welfare body.
The ministry of social policy and youth declined to comment.
The authorities have so far rejected criminal complaints about the abortion clinic website. In response to a complaint by the ombudsperson for gender equality, Višnja Ljubičić, the interior ministry said in early 2016 that it had found no criminal wrongdoing.
Masenjka Bacic is a freelance print and broadcast journalist from Split. This article was produced as part of the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, supported by the ERSTE Foundation and Open Society Foundations, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.