A banner of Jaroslaw Kaczynski from a protest last month
(Picture: AFP via Getty Images)A leading Polish politician has ignited outrage after claiming that excessive drinking by young women was to blame for the country’s low birthrate.
JarosÅaw KaczyÅski has been denounced as out of touch and patriarchal with his comments dismissed as nonsense.
Mr KaczyÅski said: “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,
“A man, in order to become an alcoholic, has to drink excessively for 20 years on average … while a woman only two.”
KaczyÅski added that he was not in favour of women having children at a young age because “a woman has to mature into a mother”.
“But, if she hits the bottle until the age of 25 – I’m joking a bit here – then it doesn’t bode well” for the birthrate, he said.
Leftwing politician Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus dismissed the comments as “rubbish”, calling Kaczynski “a patriarchal old geezer”.
“We could of course laugh about this, make memes out of it, but it’s a serious, tragic matter,” she told reporters on Monday.
Katarzyna Lubnauer, a lawmaker with the liberal Civic Coalition (KO), called KaczyÅski “out of touch” and said his comments were “nonsense insulting to women”.
Polish football star Robert Lewandowski’s wife Anna also weighed in on Instagram saying: “ENOUGH. It makes me angry when I see politicians accusing women unfairly instead of recognising the real problem.”
The 73-year-old Mr KaczyÅski has no children of his own.
Official statistics put the current birthrate at just over 1.3 children for each woman – a figure below both the EU average and the threshold of generational renewal.
