Baby On Board

Baby Parliament"

It's the new rage, bring baby along. Anywhere you go, goes baby. No, not to the shopping mall, to the supermarket, to the gym - to work! to that place of employment that pays the bills in response to a hard day's work. Because you're the Mom, and your baby is your responsibility. And since it's your infant, your baby, you've taken that responsibility seriously. Not seriously enough to rear her at home, because that's a bore.

Italian MEP Licia Ronzulli takes part in a vote as she cradles her baby at the European parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday. Photograph: Sipa Press / Rex Features

Everyone is doing it. It's the new cool. Like, see me? See my baby? Here's Mom at work, and here's baby helping. In parliament. At the office. Mind, it's the privileged, those so to speak, in the executive suite end of the workplace. Not so much the factory floor. That's not so cool? Only where the cameras can zoom in and make the issue the cause celebre it deserves to be. Motherhood and business/executive aplomb just make a natural fit.

You know that because feminists are applauding. And because this is such a delicate issue - who, after all, is willing to go out on a limb and suggest that maybe it isn't such a smart move and risk getting shot down in infamy as an antediluvian jerk, anti-feminist, anti-mother, anti-baby - people are loathe to raise the issue of w-o-r-k. Like work interruptions, distractions, the expressed opinion that while it is work to attend to a child, it does take away from the work you get paid for.

Alberta town Councillor Kara Westlund who brought her baby in to work simply has no idea why her fellow councillor who sits beside her, took exception to her two-month-old daughter being present. In a letter to the local paper Councillor Pat Monteith wrote: "Personally, I am finding it disruptive and distracting. More importantly, how do you feel about your tax dollars going to pay someone to care for her own child?"

Kara Westlund

Um, we feel, Ms. Monteith, Councillor Monteith, that it is an inappropriate thing to do. That people who go to work outside their home and are paid to do so, should not have the choice to impose their child on a shared working space with others. And that employers should not feel bludgeoned over the issue because it has support from feminists, when they prefer their employees to be unencumbered on the job by family concerns.

It was hugely inappropriate for Quebec NDP MP Sana Hassainia to bring her baby into the House of Commons during a vote because she hadn't made firm arrangements for someone responsible to take care of her three-month-old. And it is inappropriate anywhere it occurs, save for a rare occasion when someone does a one-off, briefly introducing her child to her co-workers.

It represents a bad choice. "If we're going to start bringing children into work all the time, then the organization has every right to demand the reverse - that you work at home. We have to be really careful what we ask for and what we think is appropriate"; the considered professional opinion of Linda Duxbury, professor at Carleton University's Sprott School of Business.