Skip to Content Skip to Navigation
Quick Exit

Conference 2024

Reproductive Rights and Abortion Conference 2022

Take a look at some of the highlights of our previous conference.

Keep scrolling to find photos and the conference program.

We want to send out a huge thank you to everyone who attended our conference this year! We feel truly grateful to be working in a space with such a diverse and passionate group of people!

If you have any questions regarding the conference, please feel free to contact us at [email protected]

To stay up to date with training, activities and future conference information, please sign up to our bi-monthly newsletter and follow us on social media!

“(The conference) was an opportunity to connecting with peers and community, new and established, was incredibly empowering. Came for the community, stayed for the information sharing.”

Conference Delegate

Our 2022 Keynote Speakers

Dr Melissa Kang

Dr Melissa Kang, Keynote Speaker 2022

Melissa Kang (MBBS MCH PhD) is a medical practitioner and academic specialising in adolescent health. She provides preventive and primary healthcare in a Youth Health service for at-risk young people. Melissa is an Associate Professor in General Practice at The University of Sydney and Adjunct Associate Professor in Public Health at The University of Technology Sydney. Her research focuses on access to health care and adolescent sexual health. She was the medical consultant for 23 years behind the ‘Dolly Doctor’ column in the Australian teenage girls’ magazine Dolly. She recently published two books for adolescents (co-authored with media personality Yumi Stynes): Welcome to Your Period and Welcome to Consent.

Cherisse Buzzacott

Cherisse Buzzacott

Cherisse Buzzacott is an Arrernte woman with Anmatyere/Kayteje/Arabunna  connections raised in Alice Springs, NT, a mother and a midwife she works directly with Aboriginal women from Central Australia and remote communities through the local hospital. Cherisse is passionate about supporting her own community as she has seen the impact of second-rate care for those women removed from community to birth alone and unsupported, as well as the removal of choice and autonomy on women’s own pregnancy experiences. Like many other women she herself has also experienced racism within the health care system on many occasions. 

Cherisse’s personal experience with the maternity system was traumatic as she endured a very raw and traumatic birth of her daughter Senna. At that time, Cherisse did not feel supported in the interim of her hospital care, enduring discrimination and sub-standard care, made worse by the fact that she was away from her family and traditional homeland. She shared her story nationally through an article in the Guardian and the documentary “Birth Time”. Cherisse has also written Senna’s birth story in publications and book chapters alongside other Aboriginal women’s experience accessing maternity care and, in her case, discussing why Aboriginal women avoid mainstream services in pregnancy, and the intergenerational trauma and racism that is very real in these settings. 

Previously Cherisse was involved in the Australian College of Midwives leading the Birthing on Country (BoC) Project, a national project aimed at implementing Aboriginal models of maternity care. The aim to implement culturally appropriate and Aboriginal-led maternity care services in collaboration with Aboriginal women, ensuring the provision of culturally safe care to women and families. 

[As of 2022] Currently, Cherisse is the Chair of the Rhodanthe Lipsett Indigenous Midwifery Charitable Trust – Indigenous Midwives for Tomorrow, providing scholarships to student midwives and qualified midwives, furthering their professional development opportunities’. It is important to increase the Indigenous workforce to provide enhanced support of women by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander midwives. As a midwife in Alice Springs, Cherisse’s role is to provide advocacy and care to local Aboriginal women and advocate on the rights of Aboriginal women to have autonomy and choice over their maternity care.  

Cherisse is a mum to Angus, Dylan, Douglas, and Senna (living in memory), and lives alongside her extended family 30kms west of Alice Springs on her Traditional country known as Iwupataka. 

Jess Hill

Jess Hill

Jess Hill is a Walkley award-winning journalist who specialises in reporting on coercive control and gendered violence. Prior to this, she was a Middle East correspondent, and worked as both a producer and reporter for various current affairs programs across the ABC. In 2019, she published her first book, See What You Made Me Do, about the phenomenon of domestic abuse in Australia. It was awarded the 2020 Stella Prize, has been shortlisted for several others, including the Walkley Book Award and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, and has been adapted into a television series for SBS. Recently, Jess has also produced an audio documentary series on coercive control called ‘The Trap’, and a Quarterly Essay on #MeToo in Australia, ‘The Reckoning’. 

Sponsors 2022

Huge thank you to our amazing Sponsors for our Conference 2022!  Without them, this conference wouldn’t be the success that it was.

Conference Photos from 2022

Please wait while flipbook is loading. For more related info, FAQs and issues please refer to DearFlip WordPress Flipbook Plugin Help documentation.

Conference Program 2022

Please wait while flipbook is loading. For more related info, FAQs and issues please refer to DearFlip WordPress Flipbook Plugin Help documentation.

2022 Conference Program

Click here to download the pdf version

3.90 MB

Join our mailing list!

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.