WARSAW, Poland (AFP) — Outrage built up in Poland on Monday after the governing party leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, claimed excessive drinking by young women was to blame for the European Union member’s low birth rate.
Opposition politicians, women celebrities and others denounced the 73-year-old bachelor as out-of-touch and patriarchal, dismissing his comments as nonsense.
Kaczynski made the controversial claims over the weekend.
“If we see a continuation of the situation where, until the age of 25, young women drink as much as men their age, then there will be no children,” Kaczynski said on Saturday.
The head of the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, who has no children, sourced his information to a doctor who “managed to cure a third of his male alcoholic patients but no women.”
Leftist lawmaker Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus dismissed the comments as “rubbish,” calling Kaczynski “a patriarchal old geezer.”
Katarzyna Lubnauer, a lawmaker with the liberal Civic Coalition, called Kaczynski “out of touch” and slammed his comments as “nonsense insulting to women.”
Critics argued that Polish women were hesitant to have children for financial reasons as well as out of fear over abortion restrictions introduced by the PiS.