Polish women fight back in low fertility blame game

Polish women haven’t been this angry for this long and they are taking on the ruling conservatives.

Incensed by remarks from the country’s most powerful politician Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who accused them of drinking excessively and keeping the birth rate low, many planned to take to the streets of Warsaw yesterday.

It was a repeat of the scenes from two years ago when hundreds of thousands of women marched against a near-total ban on legal abortions, in Poland’s largest public protests in decades.

What’s different this time is that the ruling party is facing the biggest challenge to its two-term rule before general elections next October.

Yesterday’s rally “is important to remind women that we have election in a year’s time,” said Marta Lempart, its organiser.

Protesters planned to gather outside Kaczynski’s house in Warsaw, where police dispersed a crowd of mostly women with batons and tear gas in 2020.

If the venue is symbolic, so is the date, coming exactly 104 years after Polish women secured the right to vote.

The Law and Justice party won over some women when it came to power in 2015 for the lavish baby bonuses it handed out. But it quickly alienated many others after the country curbed abortion rights and the government cracked down on protests.

It has also been trying to curtail access to comprehensive sex education and threatened to withdraw from an international pact aimed at tackling domestic violence.