Members of a far-right organization and police remove a woman from a church who was protesting against church support for tightening Poland's already restrictive abortion law in Warsaw, Poland on Sunday. Photo: AFP

Protesters targeted Catholic churches across Poland on Sunday in the fourth straight day of upheaval against a near-total ban on abortion in the European Union country.

Demonstrators chanted "we've had enough!" and "barbarians" inside a church in the western city of Poznan, according to a video clip posted on social media, in scenes that were repeated across the deeply Catholic country.

The protesters were reacting to Thursday's ruling by Poland's constitutional court that an existing law allowing the abortion of damaged fetuses was "incompatible" with the constitution.

The verdict is in line with the position of Poland's powerful Roman Catholic episcopate and the governing nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party.

Protesters, brandishing placards bearing expletives and others saying "I wish I could abort my government," clashed with police and supporters of the ban outside a landmark church in central Warsaw.

Local media also ran pictures of graffiti on church walls in various cities and towns reading "Women's hell" - the main slogan of the protests.

Thousands of people - most of them women - also rallied in the cities of Gdansk, Krakow, Lodz, and Rzeszow, and in dozens of traditionally more conservative towns.

There are already fewer than 2,000 legal abortions per year in Poland and the vast majority of those are carried out due to damaged fetuses.

But women's groups estimate that up to 200,000 procedures are performed illegally or abroad.

AFP