Outrage erupted in Poland on Monday after ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski claimed excessive drinking by young women was responsible for the EU member’s low birth rate. Opposition politicians, female celebrities and others denounced the 73-year-old bachelor as irrelevant and patriarchal, dismissing his comments as nonsense. Kaczynski made the controversial claims over the weekend. “If we see a continuation of the situation where, by the age of 25, young women drink as much as men their age, then there will be no children,” Kaczynski said on Saturday. “A man to become an alcoholic has to drink excessively for an average of 20 years…while a woman only two.” The head of the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, who has no children, gave his information to a doctor who “managed to treat a third of his male alcoholic patients, but not women.” Kaczynski added that he is not in favor of women having children at a young age because “a woman has to mature into a mother.” “But if it hits the bottle by age 25 — I’m kidding a little here — then it doesn’t bode well” for the birth rate. Left-wing MP Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus dismissed the comments as “rubbish”, calling Kaczynski a “patriarchal old geezer”. “We could of course laugh at it, make memes out of it, but it’s a serious, tragic case,” he told reporters on Monday. Liberal Political Coalition (KO) MP Katarzyna Lubnauer called Kaczynski “out of touch” and criticized his comments as “nonsense offensive to women”. Polish soccer star Robert Lewandowski’s wife Anna also took to Instagram saying: “ENOUGH. It makes me angry when I see politicians unfairly blaming women instead of acknowledging the real problem.” Critics argued that Polish women were reluctant to have children for economic reasons as well as fear of abortion restrictions introduced by PiS. “Poland under the PiS government is anti-family and anti-woman,” Scheuring-Wielgus said. Official statistics put the current birth rate at just over 1.3 children per woman — a figure below both the EU average and the generational replacement threshold. amj/ach
