Australian senator lauded for breastfeeding on the job
‘It’s quite strange’ that a normal, natural act caused such a sensation, mom says
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA— With the complete disregard for politics that is a characteristic of youth, Alia Joy Gates made her position clear: she would not wait to be breastfed. It did not matter that her mother, Sen. Larissa Waters, had work to do in the chamber of the Australian Senate.
She was 11-and-a-half weeks old and, for crying out loud, a girl’s gotta eat. As a result, little Alia made history. On Tuesday, she became the first child to be breastfed in Australia’s federal Parliament. By Thursday, her mundane bout of hunger had attracted praise for her mom from all over the world, including from Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, who declared (on Facebook, of course): “Go Larissa Waters — leading by example!”
Waters said in an interview that she was a bit stunned by the reaction.
“Breastfeeding is a normal and natural thing that women have been doing since time immemorial, and in that sense, it’s quite strange to me that it caused such a sensation,” she said during a break from voting in the Senate.
“What it really says is that we need more young women in Parliament so that when we breastfeed our babies, it’s not considered news.”
The response, not unlike what occurred after a lawmaker in Iceland was photographed breastfeeding while defending a bill in the country’s Parliament, reflects the degree to which maternal functions are still considered bold and political acts in institutions dominated by men.
Even as the sight of women publicly breastfeeding has become more common in many places around the world, mothers are still often publicly shamed, which has, in turn, provoked a backlash from mothers that has gone global.
In Australia — where 73 women serve in Parliament, representing 32 per cent of all federal lawmakers, compared with 31 per cent in Canada’s Parliament — the issue of child- rearing and law-making has come up before. In 2003, Kirstie Marshall, a lawmaker in the state of Victoria, was asked to leave the state’s Parliament for breastfeeding her 11-day-old baby because of a rule that bans “strangers” or unelected members in the house. In 2009, a similar rule was used in the federal Parliament when Sen. Sarah Hanson-Young tried to say goodbye to her 2-year-old daughter in the chamber only to have the Senate president insist the child be removed.