House speaker encourages women to bear children

Left-wing pundits spit fire at László Kövér, the Speaker of Parliament who said bearing children should be the most valued accomplishment in women’s lives. A conservative columnist thinks a debate on catastrophic demographic trends would be more appropriate than castigating a politician.

Addressing the Fidesz party congress on Saturday, Mr Kövér said “we would like women to consider child bearing as the highest degree of self-fulfilment.” Explaining what he meant he told Népszabadság on Tuesday that he personally regards having three sons as more important than his post as Speaker of Parliament.

In an angry Népszabadság column, Adrienn Csepelyi accuses Mr Kövér of considering women “female animals” whose task it is to produce offspring for their males.  Instead of exhorting women to offer up their wombs, she writes, the authorities should promote better birth rates by making it easier for mothers to return to the labour market. Csepelyi warns Mr Kövér that in the animal world it is the female that chooses her mate, and she tends not to choose “macho males with a God-complex”.

On Válasz, Barna Borbás recalls that the Fidesz government has enacted a series of measures to facilitate child bearing for working women, for instance child-raising allowances continue to be paid if the mother returns to her job; fathers can also choose to be the recipients of that payment and university students are also entitled to child raising allowance. While he understands the outrage of “the feminist choir”, he suggests that the real question to ask would be why most Hungarians born after 1985 have no children.

Tags: demography, Kövér