A key determinant of a woman’s freedom is having full control over her fertility, and the timing of her pregnancies. So why does anyone else get a say in this? It is estimated that between one quarter to one third of Australian women will experience an abortion in their lifetime, yet abortions on request are still considered a crime for women and doctors in NSW and have only recently been legalised in Queensland. Find out who else ‘pulls the strings’ in women’s reproductive health in this session, hosted by Prof. Leslie Cannold, an influential speaker who has twice been voted one of Australia’s most influential brains and was the 2011 Humanist of the Year.
Speaker:
Dr Leslie Cannold
Dr Leslie Cannold is a medical ethicist, activist, board member and writer. She is a member of the Victorian Board of the Nurses and Midwifery Board of Australia, the Victorian Mental Health Tribunal and Chair of the Ethics and Research Committee at Marie Stopes International (London). Having spent years as a public ethicist at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, she has appeared on ABC TV’s Q & A, Moral Compass and Tomorrow Tonight. As founding Co-President of of Reproductive Choice Australia, she led the grassroots effort to remove the effective ban on the abortion drug RU486 and helped remove abortion from the criminal law in Victoria as founding President of Pro-Choice Victoria. Her Tedx talk on abortion stigma has had 60,000 views.