In remarks that sparked outrage and were described as “insulting” to women, Jaroslaw Kaczynski said he did not favor “very early motherhood” because a woman should mature before having children. The leader of the populist ruling Law and Justice party said that if women were abusing alcohol by the age of 25, then “it’s not a good prognosis in these matters”. “And here we sometimes need to speak a little openly, some bitterly. no guys,” Mr Kaczynski said. He added that the average man “to develop alcoholism has to drink excessively for 20 years” and “a woman only two”. “I’m a really sincere supporter of women’s equality, but I’m not a supporter of women pretending to be men and men pretending to be women, because that’s a completely different thing,” she said. Mr Kaczynski made the comment at the weekend as he traveled around the country seeking to drum up support for his party ahead of parliamentary elections next year. Opposition politicians and other critics have accused the 73-year-old, a lifelong bachelor, of being out of touch – and of being partly responsible for the low birth rate in the central European nation of 38 million people. Some pointed to restrictions on abortion that have discouraged some women from having children. Others noted the difficulty young people face in raising families due to rising costs in a country where inflation is now nearly 18 percent. When a government spokesman argued on a TV show that alcohol’s influence on fertility was in fact a legitimate topic of debate, an opposition politician, Kamila Gasiuk-Pihowicz, responded: “This is not a debate, it’s an insult to Polish women.” Mr Kaczynski defended himself by saying that “an honest politician, if he knows something like this, should talk about it”. The number of births per woman in Poland fell from 3 in 1960 to 1.32 in 2021, according to Polish state data, which is low but still higher than some other European countries.
