Leaders of a growing women’s rights movement in Poland have vowed to keep up the pressure on the country’s ruling rightwing government with ongoing protests against proposed restrictions on abortion.

Thousands of women demonstrated in the streets of Warsaw, Gdańsk, Łódź, Wrocław, Poznań and other cities and towns across the country on Sunday and Monday.

Demonstrators chanted “We are not folding up our umbrellas” in a reference to the wave of protests earlier this month when tens of thousands of Poles gathered in grisly weather to challenge a proposed blanket ban on abortion, forcing Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) to throw out the proposals.

Despite the success of the protest on 3 October, campaigners stress that women in Poland remain under threat from a government they describe as beholden to hardline conservative activists and elements of Poland’s powerful Catholic church.

“We have three main causes: no to violence and hatred towards women; no to the church in politics; no to politics in education,” said Marta Lempart, who has been coordinating the nationwide protests from the south-western city of Wrocław.

Participants in a protest in Łodz, Poland, on Monday. Photograph: Grzegorz Michalowski/EPA

Under pressure from anti-abortion activists and MPs angered by the government’s U-turn on the ban, PiS leaders have signalled their intention to tighten Poland’s abortion laws further, stopping short of a total ban, by removing an exemption allowing for terminations in cases where the foetus has a congenital disorder.

PiS’s leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, caused outrage earlier this month when he declared: “We will strive to ensure that even in pregnancies which are very difficult, when a child is sure to die, strongly deformed, women end up giving birth so that the child can be baptised, buried, and have a name.”

Activists say Kaczyński’s comments show the callous disregard many of the country’s political and religious leaders have for the dignity of Polish women, not to mention non-Catholics. “It is about all women’s issues now,” said Lempart.

Many women have been incensed by the ruling party’s characterisation of the protesters as unwitting victims of manipulation by the government’s political opponents.

In a statement published on Twitter immediately after the proposed abortion ban was rejected by a parliamentary committee, PiS accused the opposition of “playing on the emotions of women”, declaring that it “won’t allow Polish women to be brought out on to the streets”.

“Women are being deceived by leftist organisations,” Mariusz Błaszczak, Poland’s interior minister, told state television.

The protestors also include many self-identified Catholics dismayed by what they regard as an excessively politicised church failing in its duty to show compassion.

“The Catholic church as an institution has shifted from being willing to guide and protect to being willing to rule and preserve its power,” said Katarzyna Tyszkiewicz-Borawska, 27, a journalist and practising Catholic.

One archbishop, Henryk Hoser, who is also a trained physician, drew criticism and ridicule earlier this month for claiming that pregnancies “rarely” occurred as a result of rape because when the body is “exposed to so much stress, it works against fertilisation”.

Echoing government officials, Hoser has claimed that the protestors had been misled by “hysterical misinformation”; Kaczyński has described the protests as “an attack on the church” and “a threat to the foundations of our national existence”.

Recent instances of online shaming and attempts to bully and humiliate a number of high-profile supporters of the so-called “black protests” have sparked a national conversation about the treatment of women in Polish society at large.

After journalist and pro-choice activist Anna Dryjańska appeared on television during a protest outside Kaczyński’s Warsaw home, rightwing columnist Rafał Ziemkiewicz posted an offensive tweet that prompted Dryjańska to take legal action against him.

When Polish R&B singer Natalia Przybysz, who has two children, revealed in an interview last week that she had once gone to Slovakia for an abortion, the tabloid newspaper Super Express ran the headline “She killed a baby so as to have more space for books”.

People march during a protest against plans to tighten abortion laws in Warsaw on Sunday. Photograph: Jakub Kaminski/EPA

Tyszkiewicz-Borawska said: “It is not about ‘killing babies’. It’s about safety during pregnancy and childbirth, it’s about taking care of the mothers of disabled children.”

Przybysz’s experience resonated with many Polish women, many of whom have only recently disclosed their own abortions to close friends or family as a result of the debate sparked by the protests.

“Whether you have experienced childbirth, or you know someone whose child died after delivery, or you know someone having to raise a disabled child alone, women are sharing stories,” said Jaga, 34, an events organiser who supports the protests but declined to give her last name. “These are not topics you raise at the dinner table at Christmas, but thanks to the abortion bill, people started to talk about them.”

Meanwhile, some analysts caution that broadening the scope of the protests does carry risks.

“The biggest challenge is connected with the attempt to change the nature of the protest from a spontaneous reaction against a concrete proposal, into a longer-lasting social movement,” said Karolina Wigura of Kultura Liberalna, a centrist thinktank based in Warsaw.

“What we might see over time is more moderate and less politically engaged women drifting away, civil society getting fatigued, and a gradual loss of influence on the political process.”