Leslie Cannold is an Australian philosopher, ethicist, educationalist, writer, activist, and public intellectual. Born and raised in Armonk and Scarsdale, New York, Leslie Cannold migrated to Melbourne in her early twenties. She began writing for The Age as an opinion and education section columnist while raising young children and completing her graduate degrees. A non-fiction author and novelist, Cannold is a familiar voice and face on radio and TV in Australia. She is on the speaking circuit giving keynotes and hosting panels on ethics, gender politics, inspirational leadership, and reproductive rights. In 2005, she was named one of Australia's top twenty public intellectuals by The Age newspaper. In 2011, Cannold was awarded Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies.
Education and career
Educated at Wesleyan University, where she studied psychology and theatre, she has a Master of Arts and a Masters in Bioethics from Monash University, where she worked for Peter Singer at the Centre for Human Bioethics. She earned her PhD in Education at the University of Melbourne before commencing employment at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics when C. A. J. Coady was director. she maintains adjunct positions at both universities though she left academic employment in 2006 to pursue writing and public speaking full-time. Cannold is oft-noted as one of Australia's leading public thinkers and women. In 2005, she was named alongside Peter Singer, Gustav Nossal, and Inga Clendinnen as one of Australia's top 20 public intellectuals. In 2013, she was named in the Power Index's Top Ten List of most influential brains.
Books and columns
Cannold's fortnightly Moral Dilemma column has appeared in Sydney's Sunday Sun-Herald since 2007. Prior to that, she was an occasional columnist for The Age. Her opinions have also appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, Crikey!, The Herald Sun, ABCThe Drum Unleashed, The Courier Mail, and the national broadsheet The Australian. In 2011, she was recognised with an EVA for a Sunday Age opinion piece on sexual assault. Her books include the award-winning The Abortion Myth: Feminism morality and the hard choices women make and What, No Baby?: Why women are losing the freedom to mother and how they can get it back, which made the Australian Financial Review's top 101 books list. Her first work of fiction, The Book of Rachael, a historical novel, was published in 2011 and reprinted in 2012. She publishes on diverse subject areas, including grief, circumcision, HIV/AIDS, genetic manipulation, ex utero gestation, and regulating Assisted Reproductive Technologies. She published chapters in Sperm Wars and The Australian Book of Atheism, and Destroying the joint.
Cannold is , a national coalition of pro-choice organisations that played a key role in removing the ban on the abortion drug RU486 in 2006, and of Pro Choice Victoria, which was instrumental in the in 2008. In 2011, she co-founded the not-for-profit speaker referral site No Chicks No Excuses. Leslie Cannold was awarded 2011 Australian Humanist of the Year in recognition of her valuable contribution to public debate on a wide range of ethical issues, of particular relevance to women and family life. Her TEDx talk on abortion has had close to 60,000 views, and in 2016, she spoke to around 6,000 activists from 169 countries at the International Women Deliver conference in Copenhagen about abortion stigma.
Personal life
Cannold identifies herself as a secular Jew. She has two sons.
