Doctor furious after being kicked out of Virgin airport lounge for pumping breastmilk

3 hours ago 1

A breastfeeding mother has been asked to leave a Virgin airport business lounge because she was pumping breast milk, she claims.

Dr Elise Turner said she was in the Virgin airport business lounge, at what appears to be Melbourne Airport in her video, expressing breast milk using a pump underneath her T-shirt when she was asked to stop.

“I’ve been told that I can’t sit here in the Virgin lounge as a paying business-class ticket holder to express breast milk... because this is a private business lounge, and we don’t do that here,” Turner said on social media.

Turner claimed a service manager in the lounge told her she could not express milk there.

“[She] has explicitly told me I am not to do that in the public lounge area, and that I must go and sit in a bathroom, in a toilet,” she said. “I did ask her, ‘Do you prepare your own dinner in a shared bathroom, a public bathroom, or a public toilet?’ And she didn’t have an answer for that.”

Turner said she tried to politely provide education to the service manager that breastfeeding is protected under the National Sex Discrimination Act of 1984. Still, she was then asked to leave the lounge.

“Her reply was that I am making her and other people uncomfortable,” Turner said.

“And then she put her hand on my arm and asked me to leave the lounge.”

Turner, who is a general practitioner on the Gold Coast who specialises in women’s health, left the lounge but said she was furious at her treatment.

“This is just disgusting,” she said. “This is 2025, and this is the sort of treatment that lactating mothers are expected to deal with.”

A spokeswoman for Virgin Australia apologised on behalf of the airline.

“We are sorry for the way this situation was handled,” she said. “It fell short of the high standards of care and customer service our team strives to deliver. We have reached out to our guest today to apologise directly.”

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