Last November, North Vancouver MLA Bowinn Ma welcomed her first child, Azalea, becoming one of only around a dozen female cabinet ministers in Canadian history to have given birth while holding office. When she posted a photo of a bassinet in her office on social media, the congratulations were mingled with criticisms. “How are you going to do your job when you’re going to be focusing on your baby?” one person replied. Several others decried her decision to continue working as naive and selfish.
If you think that having a baby is incompatible with certain careers, then you effectively believe that birthing parents should only have one or the other. Few people would admit to holding this belief—or at least fewer than in previous generations—but they hardly need to say it. Instead, it is implicit in the expectation that mothers, but not fathers, restructure—or entirely abandon—their professional ambitions after having a baby.
