For almost 20 years, Prime Minister Scott ‘Scomo’ Morrison and his wife Jenny tried to have kids, but were unable to conceive due to fertility issues.
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“I was very sad that I couldn’t have children. That framed a lot of my life,” Jenny told The Australian Women’s Weekly in 2015.
After grappling with a few rounds of IVF, Australia’s ‘First Lady’ fell pregnant at 39, and the couple naturally welcomed their first daughter Abigail (Abbey) in 2007, and their second child Lily a year later.
“She is our miracle child,” Scomo wrote about his first-born in 2009. “The answer to a lifetime of prayer and 14 years of painful, invasive, heartbreaking treatment.”
While raising daughters of the PM, Jenny is adamant on maintaining some normalcy in Abbey and Lily’s upbringing.
“I might be the Prime Minister’s wife, but I’m still a mum with two young girls and trying to keep things as normal as possible,” she told Nine Honey.
“I think maybe people picture that your life as the wife of the Prime Minister is glamorous and amazing and exciting. But no… I’m doing the same things everyone else does. It’s hard work being a parent.”
Under their parents’ instructions, Abbey and Lily don’t have any social media accounts.
“They’re constantly telling me ‘it’s not the 1980s, Mum’ and I’m saying, ‘I know, it’s worse, so you do what we say’.”
Scomo has also spoken about the decision to distance their kids from social media in a 2019 interview about kids literacy.
“Our kids don’t go on social media, but at some point when they do … (they have to understand) you don’t assume that everything there is genuine and you have to develop that scepticism,” he said.
“These are valuable tools but they can also be quite dangerous in the wrong hands. If you create these things then you have a moral as well as a broader societal responsibility in terms of how they are used.”
That same year, the PM made reference to his daughters in a speech for International Women’s Day, saying they are the “centre of our lives”.
“My girls, they allow us as parents to see the world through new eyes, through young eyes, through fresh eyes,” he said.
Scomo also spoke about the moment Abbey and Lily were born, saying his “heart filled with wanting them to be everything they could be”.
“To be happy, confident, and to have the choices in life that they would want for themselves,” he said.
