Australian senator breast-feeds in Parliament; world notices

Mom points out multitasking allows her to serve, parent.

SYDNEY — With the complete disregard for politics that is a characteristic of youth, Alia Joy Gates made her position clear: She could not wait to be breast-fed. It did not matter that her mother, Sen. Larissa Waters, had work to do in the chamber of the Australian Senate.

She was 11 1/2 weeks old and, for crying out loud, a girl’s gotta eat.

As a result, little Alia made history. Last week, she became the first child to be breast-fed in Australia’s federal Parliament. Within days, 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.

“Breast-feeding 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 breast-feed our babies it’s not considered news.”

The response, not unlike what occurred after a lawmaker in Iceland was photographed breast-feeding 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 breast-feeding 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.

The internet is full of sharp comebacks that women can deploy when someone tries to shut them down for feeding. One mall in Colombia even introduced breast-feeding mannequins to combat the criticism.

In Australia — where 73 women serve in Parliament, representing 32 percent of all federal lawmakers, compared with 19 percent in the U.S. Congress — the issue of child-rearing and lawmaking has come up before. In 2003, Kirstie Marshall, a lawmaker in the state of Victoria, was asked to leave the state’s Parliament for breast-feeding her 11-day-old baby because of a rule that bans “strangers” or unelected members in the house (presumably including babes in arms).

In 2009, a similar rule was used in the federal Parliament when Sen. Sarah Hanson-Young tried to say a quick goodbye to her 2-year-old daughter in the chamber only to have the Senate president insist that the child be removed, leading to screams from the toddler that were heard through the thick Senate doors.

“Movement in the Australian Parliament on issues like this has been glacial,” said Sue Boyce, a former Liberal Party senator who was there that day.

Last year, after a previously failed attempt, Australia’s federal Parliament changed its rules to allow for breast-feeding and at least some family contact.

Waters — an Australian Greens party member, like Hanson-Young — said she figured that at some point she might end up taking advantage of the new rule. But she did not think much about it last week as the budget debate dominated the chamber’s discussion.

“I just accepted that when the baby was hungry I would feed her, and if that so happened to be when I was in the chamber, I knew that was permissible, and I didn’t really think much beyond that, to be honest,” she said.

In the Senate, the response was muted. Most lawmakers said nothing or praised Waters afterward, though one conservative lawmaker made a comment about the Greens party wanting to take home wounded possums and “suckle them back to health,” which struck Waters as inappropriate.

“That was about half an hour after I’d given her a feed, and I thought that was in very poor taste,” she said.

And some outside the chamber accused her of seeking publicity.

Still, breast-feeding fights, in the senator’s view, seemed to be a bit, well, boring. After praising her husband, Jeremy Gates, who left a job in digital marketing to be a stay-athome dad, Waters said she looked forward to focusing on lawmaking, even while breast-feeding.

“We can walk and chew gum at the same time,” she said. “And whilst you need support in order to juggle the job of being a parliamentarian and a mom, we are perfectly capable of performing that juggling act generally when we have great family support, which I’m lucky to have.” A tiny coo could be heard in the background. Then an itty-bitty cry.

Was Alia there? “Yeah,... “I’m multitasking.”