WARSAW — To Magda, giving birth would have meant inflicting a slow death. Her unborn child had a rare genetic syndrome that causes severe, fatal birth defects.

“I would feed it, hug it, love it, get attached to it, and then, when it would be 3 or 4 months old, it would suffocate while in my arms,” she recalled, explaining her decision a decade ago to have an abortion. “It would scar me for life. I don’t know if I would be capable of giving birth to another child and not look at it as if it were the one that had died in my arms.”

She asked that her surname not be used, fearing that the agonizing decision she made could be used to shame her. But even in Poland, an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country with some of the strictest anti-abortion laws in Europe and a government seeking to curb reproductive rights, it is a decision she could still make legally — at least for now.

Lawmakers from the governing Law and Justice party, who have previously tried to ban all abortions, are making a renewed push to outlaw them, even when the fetus is sure to die in infancy.