About Sharon
Sharon Stoliar is a Sri Lankan-born Australian researcher, author and advocate. Sharon’s research and advocacy work focuses on birth trauma, culturally safe maternity care, and confronting racism and antisemitism in Australian healthcare.
How this work began
Sharon’s advocacy began with her own birth in 2011. After an emergency caesarean she developed acute compartment syndrome in her right lower leg. She was a midwife giving birth in the hospital where she had trained, yet her reports of severe, unrelenting pain were dismissed for ten days. By the time the diagnosis was confirmed, emergency surgery was no longer possible. She kept her leg, but was left with permanent nerve and muscle damage, chronic pain and PTSD. She later wrote about that experience in her memoir Scars of Gold (2023), which received a Literary Titan Gold Book Award.
After 7 October
After 7 October 2023, Sharon — married to an Israeli Jewish man, and full-time stepmother to two Jewish children who had moved to live with Sharon and her husband only five months earlier — began speaking publicly about antisemitism in Australian hospitals and maternity services. She raised those concerns with AHPRA and the Health Care Complaints Commission. What followed was a coordinated campaign of vexatious complaints against her, doxxing, online abuse and professional isolation. She continued the work. She co-founded the Australian Zionist Healthcare Alliance and has led the Maternity Consumer Network through a period of intense hostility, documenting what Jewish women and clinicians have faced in the system meant to care for them.
While she was a PhD student in the same midwifery faculty, she was bullied by a senior academic who publicly endorsed a threat to destroy her midwifery career. The university did not protect her. She withdrew from that candidature and transferred her PhD to Southern Cross University.
Research, teaching and public health
Alongside this, Sharon has spent nearly two decades in clinical practice, communicable disease control and surveillance in public health, and teaching and research at universities. She holds a Bachelor of Nursing and a Graduate Diploma in Midwifery from the University of Technology Sydney, and dual Master’s degrees in Public Health and International Public Health from UNSW. Her PhD research examines midwives’ own childbearing experiences and how that personal experience changes professional practice. She has published in Women and Birth and BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, and has been an invited keynote speaker on birth trauma, culturally safe care, and the cost of not listening to women in maternity care.
What she focuses on
While there are many noble causes in maternity care that need advocacy and support, Sharon’s work is focused on the issues above. She is thankful for the many others who champion different causes in women’s health and maternity care. We need people who will speak up for the marginalised, and for those who do not have a voice.