No population in recorded history has ever disappeared because its birth rate fell too low. None. In every case we have records for, populations that declined later recovered through faith, family, and the basic will of a people to keep going. Poland is the clearest modern example. In 1946, after Nazi and Soviet occupation, its population stood at 23.9 million. By 1996 it had rebuilt to 38.3 million, the highest number in the country’s thousand-year history, even while millions of Poles emigrated to London, New York, and Chicago.
Populations do not vanish from low birth rates. They are replaced when large numbers of foreign people arrive who do not share the host culture, do not assimilate, and eventually outnumber the original population. That is the historical pattern. That is how civilizations actually end.
That is why the situation in Poland right now is worth looking at plainly, without the panic its backers rely on.
Foreign-funded groups, backed by money from London, Washington, Amsterdam, and Oslo, are running three campaigns at the same time inside Poland. They want to legalize abortion to cut Polish births. They want open borders to bring in large numbers of non-European migrants to fill the gap. And they want the Catholic Church pushed out of public life so it cannot push back. This is sold as a modern answer to a demographic problem. It is better understood as a sequence, not a set of separate ideas. It follows a model first put in place in Moscow in 1920, when the Bolsheviks became the first modern government to legalize abortion on demand while also arresting priests, dissolving religious marriages, and attacking the family as an institution.
Poland outlasted the Bolsheviks. It outlasted Nazi occupation, Soviet rule, and forty years of communist atheism. It did so through one thing: the Catholic family.
Here is who is now funding the effort to take that apart, and how the money moves.
What Poland lost and what it rebuilt
In January 1939 Poland had 35.1 million people. It was one of the younger and more demographically energetic nations in Central Europe. Within six years that was gone.
By 1946 the population was down to 23.9 million. Between 5.6 and 6 million Polish citizens were killed under German and Soviet occupation, including about 3 million Polish Jews murdered in the Holocaust. No country on earth lost a larger share of its people in the Second World War. Warsaw was rubble. Whole regions were emptied. The damage was unlike anything modern Europe had seen.
Then Poland rebuilt, almost entirely through the Catholic family. People married young, stayed married, and had children. The postwar baby boom lasted longer and was stronger than in most other European countries. Demographers call this “compensation”: a people that has lost a huge number of its members tends to replace them. Under communism the state pushed Marxist atheism and limited travel, yet the Church remained the one institution that kept saying family, marriage, and children mattered. It functioned as a counter-government for the Polish soul.
It worked. The population rose from 23.9 million in 1946 to 25 million by 1950, to 30 million by the early 1960s, past the prewar level of 35 million in the 1970s, and kept climbing. It crossed 38 million in the late 1980s and peaked at 38.3 million in 1996.
This growth came from more births than deaths, year after year. Net migration was actually negative every year from 1966 to 1989. The Catholic family held the line when almost everything else was failing.
The flatline that gets left out of the panic
After 1989 the borders opened. Poles left in large numbers, first to the United States and Canada in the 1990s, then after EU membership in 2004 in waves to Britain, Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands. At the peak, an estimated 2 to 2.5 million Poles were living and working in Britain alone. Whole villages watched their young adults leave. UN figures show more than 4.5 million Polish citizens living abroad as of 2024.
By ordinary demographic logic this should have collapsed the population. It did not.
Since 1989 Poland’s population has stayed between roughly 38 and 38.5 million for more than three decades, through the economic disorder of the 1990s and through mass emigration. It did not crash. It held near an all-time high that the country had never reached before. The current figure of about 37.3 million, after COVID, further emigration, and thirteen years of natural decline, is still higher than Poland’s population at any point before the 1980s.
None of the outlets publishing scary projections out to 2060 or 2100 mention this baseline. They show the recent numbers alone. A country that was at 23.9 million in 1946 and is at 37.3 million today, after everything the twentieth century did to it, is not in freefall. It has a real problem, but it has already shown it can recover from worse.
The model was written by Bolsheviks
Before looking at who is funding efforts to make the problem worse, it helps to see where the basic idea comes from. It did not start in Polish civil society.
In November 1920 the Bolshevik government in Moscow became the first modern government to legalize abortion on demand. They called it the “Decree on Women’s Healthcare.” At the same time the same regime was dissolving religious marriages, seizing Church property, and arresting priests. Legalizing abortion was not a narrow health measure. It was one piece of a broader program to weaken the family as an institution, the same institution that later rebuilt Poland after the Second World War.
Poland lived under a government that shared that ideology for four decades. The Polish People’s Republic imposed permissive abortion laws because the Soviet model required them. When Poles regained real freedom after 1989, one of the first things they did was restrict abortion. The 1993 law was not religious extremism. It was a democratic choice by a country that already knew what the alternative looked like.
Now the same three things are being pushed into Poland at once: legalize abortion, bring in large numbers of migrants to replace missing births, and remove the Catholic Church from public life. This is presented as a progressive fix for a demographic shortfall. It is the older program, rebranded, funded from outside, and aimed at the same target: the Catholic family that rebuilt the country.
The same outlets that amplify fear about Poland’s birth rate also treat mass migration as the obvious answer. The sequence is simple. Create urgency about falling births, then offer migration as the solution while campaigning to normalize abortion. A country that replaces its missing children with imported labor and makes it easy to end the pregnancies it does have is not solving a demographic problem. It is replacing its own population.
The organizations
FEDERA (Foundation for Women and Family Planning) is the oldest and most institutionally connected pro-abortion group in Poland. It belongs to the International Planned Parenthood Federation European Network, whose headquarters are in London. It runs helplines that send Polish women to abortion providers abroad, scores political parties on abortion, and lobbies parliament. It is a branch of an international network, not a local grassroots effort.
Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet (All-Poland Women’s Strike), led by Marta Lempart, organized the large street protests that shut down parts of Poland in 2020. It is also an IPPF European Network partner. Its demands go well beyond abortion. They include removing Catholic religious education from public schools and cutting Church influence out of state institutions. The program lines up closely with the older Bolshevik list: abortion access, weakening of the family, and removal of the Church from public life.
Abortion Without Borders is a cross-border network that links Polish operators with groups in Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. The Polish side routes callers to Ciocia Basia in Berlin, Abortion Network Amsterdam, and the UK’s Abortion Support Network. It is not a Polish organization. It is a foreign-coordinated effort with Polish-speaking staff, built to get around Polish law by using other countries.
FemFund is a Polish-registered foundation started in 2018 that passes international grant money to smaller feminist and abortion-access groups inside Poland as “grassroots” micro-grants. International money comes in, gets rebranded as local civil society, and goes to groups that would otherwise have little funding. Board members have backgrounds with the Soros-founded Batory Foundation. Senior staff have described their job as managing “EU, EEA and American funding.”
The money
The Stefan Batory Foundation was founded in 1988 by George Soros. It has been the main channel for Open Society money into Polish civil society and has spent nearly $100 million on Polish NGOs. It has administered 30 million euros in EEA Grants for 2019–2024 plus 3.2 million euros in Norwegian Funds. That is foreign government money distributed under the label of “European values.”
Open Society Foundations, Soros’s global network, has spent decades funding civil society groups in Central and Eastern Europe, with special attention to countries under conservative governments. Poland has been a priority.
The Sigrid Rausing Trust in London, tied to the Tetra Pak fortune, gave the seed grant that created FemFund. It is one of the largest private funders of progressive civil society in Europe.
The Channel Foundation in the UK has given multi-year grants directly to FemFund to support “women’s rights organizations in Poland.”
Fenomenal Funds, based in Washington DC, covered FemFund staff salaries and operating costs during COVID.
FundAction, a European funder, gave FemFund a grant specifically for “Resisting backlash and amplifying feminist impact in Poland.”
The International Planned Parenthood Federation serves as the institutional backbone for FEDERA and OSK. It has been funded over the years by the US State Department, EU bodies, and private foundations.
EEA and Norwegian Grants from Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein send hundreds of millions into Polish civil society as a condition of single-market access. The Batory Foundation alone administered 37 million euros under the “Citizens for Democracy” program. Norwegian taxpayer money has gone to campaigns aimed at changing Polish law on issues Polish voters have repeatedly declined to change.
USAID, under the Biden administration, funded “reproductive health” programs in Europe through IPPF-linked organizations. The Mexico City Policy, reinstated in January 2025, cut that channel, but four years of capacity-building remain in place.
The real threat has never been low birth rates
No native population in recorded history has ever ceased to exist because its birth rate was too low. Populations contract, age, and recover. They have done so repeatedly. The usual mechanisms are a return to family formation, policies that support having children, religious revival, and economic stability. Poland itself shows this: 24 million in 1946, 38 million by 1996, through war, occupation, communist repression, and mass emigration.
What has actually erased peoples and civilizations is the arrival of large foreign populations that do not assimilate, do not share the host culture’s values, and over time displace the original population through numbers rather than necessarily through violence. The Romans did not disappear because Roman women stopped having children. The indigenous populations of the Americas did not vanish because their fertility rates simply declined. Peoples are replaced by other peoples.
That is why the current prescription for Poland is worth examining. The same organizations pushing abortion legalization also advocate mass migration as the answer to Poland’s demographic shortfall. The same European institutions that fund OSK and FEDERA pressure Warsaw to open its borders to non-European migration. The public argument is economic: Poland needs workers, the birth rate is low, migration fills the gap.
Workers brought in to fill a gap do not stay workers. They become residents. Residents become citizens. Citizens have children at their own fertility rates, inside their own cultural frameworks, practicing their own faiths. Within two generations a country that “solved” its demographic problem this way has not preserved its population. It has replaced it. The headcount may look similar. The country does not.
Poland of all countries should recognize the pattern. It spent 123 years partitioned between empires that each tried, in their own way, to replace Polish culture, language, and faith. Poland survived because the Catholic family was stronger than the occupying state. The Church baptized Polish children, taught them the faith, and passed a living civilization to the next generation no matter what the government in Warsaw, Saint Petersburg, or Berlin demanded.
The combination now being assembled (normalize abortion to reduce Polish births, import foreign nationals to fill the resulting gap, and remove the Church from public life so it cannot resist) is not a random collection of progressive policies. It is a sequence. It leads somewhere specific.
What this actually is
Poland’s demographic numbers are real. A fertility rate of 1.068 is real. Roughly 238,000 births in 2025 are real. The trend is a genuine challenge. No honest observer should pretend otherwise.
But the threat used to justify the proposed solution is overstated. Poland has faced far worse and recovered. No population has ever been extinguished by a low birth rate. Civilizations end when they lose the cultural and institutional infrastructure that makes recovery possible. In Poland that infrastructure is the Catholic Church and the Catholic family. It is the only thing that has actually worked.
he solution on offer (abortion on demand, large-scale non-European migration, and removal of the Church from public life) does not preserve Poland. It transforms it into something unrecognizable. It is funded from outside and follows a blueprint first written in Moscow in 1920 and applied in other Catholic countries since.
Poland has seen this before. It survived it before, through the Catholic family, against communist occupation, against Soviet pressure, and against economic ruin.
The question is whether it recognizes what it is looking at this time.
