Sonali Silva is a global health advocate and gender equity specialist who champions youth-led change in sexual and reproductive health.
She is the Director of YIELD Hub and Co-Chair of SheDecides, where she drives global efforts for bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom.
Her research explores abortion stigma and access to care in Sri Lanka. She has published work on gender and the COVID-19 infodemic and is currently studying how Sri Lankan women seek abortion information online.
Sonali uses research, storytelling, and advocacy to challenge stigma and advance more inclusive, equitable system.
#TEDxColombo #MADNESS
What if the antidote to stigma isn’t a policy or a protest, but a person? In this moving talk, Sonali Silva explores abortion stigma in Sri Lanka to reveal how deeply stigma lives in our laws, cultures, and bodies. Drawing from personal experience and public health evidence, she argues that we can’t dismantle stigma by building safe spaces alone, we must become them. This is a call to transform silence into solidarity, and to lead with empathy, truth, and courage.
Virginia Woolf came here and gave the lecture that became A Room of One’s Own. Sylvia Plath studied here years later and carried her own brilliance, intensity, and struggle through these spaces.
To honour women like this is to understand what they had to push against so that women after them could think, write, study, and make lives on our own terms.
I feel very aware that none of this begins with me.
And that is precisely what makes it powerful.
