Advocacy
ONE — Sharon was a midwife before she became a mother. After a very long posterior labour she gave birth to her son by emergency caesarean for what the doctors and midwives called a “failure to progress.”
Within 24 hours her right lower leg developed acute compartment syndrome — a rare, limb- and life-threatening complication that needs urgent decompressive surgery (a fasciotomy) to prevent permanent damage and amputation. Despite pain that morphine did not touch — pain she has said would have led her to cut her own leg off if she had had a knife — she was not listened to. She was not believed, even though the leg had swollen dramatically, was raging red, and her foot had dropped. A neurologist queried compartment syndrome on day one. The obstetricians had never seen it in an obstetric setting, so it was dismissed. By the time an MRI confirmed the diagnosis it was day ten, and too late for surgery. The damage had already been done.
She was discharged on day 15 with a new baby, a foot-drop splint and a walking frame. She could not stand, walk safely with him in her arms, or get to the bathroom alone. When he cried, someone else ran to the cot and settled him on their chest, in their arms, not hers. Even though it was her own family, it was still not her. It was not her face he saw first at night, or in the day. It was not her, because she could not get up. She had to watch other people comfort her baby. That is still the part that crushes her.
She had trained and worked in that hospital. In a uniform and a work badge, what she said mattered. Her words carried weight. She could make things happen. The moment she was the woman in the bed, in a patient gown, nothing she said carried any weight.
Nothing could have prevented the compartment syndrome from developing. Listening to her, believing her, and taking the pain seriously could have changed the outcome. When maternity care providers do not listen, they strip a woman of her power and identity. There is a cost.
That is where the advocacy began: the 2017 talk on the cost of not listening, then Scars of Gold, evidence to the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into Birth Trauma in 2023, and Australia’s first Respectful Maternity Care Conference in March 2026 through the Maternity Consumer Network.
TWO —
Sharon is Sri Lankan-born. She knows what migrant women describe because she has lived the gap between being “one of us” on paper and being dismissed in the room. At the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into Birth Trauma she said she has often wondered whether assumptions about her race played a part in her own pain being ignored. Women of colour in Australian maternity care describe being unwelcome, talked down to, treated as a nuisance, and stereotyped by skin, name, accent or religion. On the ward that can sound like “the typical Indian or Sri Lankan drama queen complaining about pain.” She told the committee to call it racism.
The problem does not stop at the first generation. A Sri Lankan woman born in Australia wrote that postnatal staff ignored her until her white husband was in the room. In NSW, South Asia is the second-largest region for maternal country of birth. Continuity of midwifery care would help these women most, yet many never hear that midwifery group practice exists, or that you usually have to book at the start of pregnancy to get it. That knowledge is still a luxury.
Australian midwifery — clinical, research and academic — does not look like the women in antenatal clinic. Nursing is more diverse. Midwifery ATAR cut-offs lock out students whose first language is not English. In many South Asian families, medicine, law and engineering are the respectable professions. Midwifery is often treated as lesser, especially for daughters. Sharon is the first Sri Lankan-born midwife in Australia to complete a PhD. That is how thin the pipeline still is.
Her work here is practical. Through the Maternity Consumer Network and the Multicultural Centre for Respectful Maternity Care she backs culturally safe training and consumer-led work so migrant and refugee women do not have to translate themselves into a system that was not built around them. She speaks in schools where South Asian students are choosing subjects. She names midwifery as skilled, intellectual work. Cultural safety is not something white institutions deliver to brown women. It is also something brown women lead.
THREE — Antisemitism in maternity care and healthcare
After 7 October 2023, Jewish midwives, nurses and pregnant women began to contact Sharon privately. They were afraid in the places that were supposed to be safest: wards, staff rooms, professional forums. She was already known in maternity advocacy. She is not Jewish. She is married to an Israeli Jewish man and raising Jewish children. She decided that looking away was not available.
She spoke because antisemitism in healthcare is a maternity issue. Jewish women give birth in Australian hospitals. Jewish clinicians walk into the same wards. When political hatred is worn on a uniform, pinned to a lanyard, or written into a record, it is a risk to the woman in the hospital bed.
The cost was immediate and professional. She was doxxed. She was harassed across social media. Vexatious complaints were filed with regulators by people who had never been her patients. She surrendered her nursing and midwifery registration to stop a process that had become the punishment. Inside parts of the maternity advocacy world she was treated as a problem to be removed rather than a colleague raising a safety concern. Institutions that speak fluently about equity were slower when the target was a Jewish family, or a woman standing with one.
She co-founded the Australian Zionist Healthcare Alliance and serves as its Public Officer. Through AZHA she works for the safety of Zionist (Jewish and non-Jewish) patients and clinicians in Australian hospitals: recording incidents, speaking to media and inquiries, and pushing institutions that talk about equity to treat antisemitism as a clinical safety issue. She wants Jewish women to be able to give birth, and Jewish staff to be able to walk onto a ward, without first weighing whether it is safe to say who they are.
Sharon’s advocacy has three strands. They look separate until they are not. Each begins with a woman who was not believed, and each asks the same thing of Australian maternity care: listen, and do not decide in advance whose safety counts.