Australian DJ Liv Nervo has been embroiled in a four year legal battle, and is speaking out how she was tricked into a pregnancy. The New Zealand businessman in question has moved to appeal the case in the UK High Court, meaning Nervo can now share her story. Katherine Berney shares this piece.
We are very good at recognising violence when it is visible, when there is physical harm or a clear incident that allows us to point and say, unequivocally, that should not have happened.
This is how we have been taught to understand harm. It is how systems are designed to respond. It is what fits within legal definitions, media narratives and public understanding.
What we are far less comfortable with is harm that sits inside deception, where control is exercised quietly over time through information withheld, realities constructed, and choices shaped long before they are ever consciously made. Reproductive coercion sits in that space.
It is often misunderstood as a messy relationship or reduced to questions of personal responsibility, when we should recognise the conditions under which decisions are made. It is about power operating in ways that are not immediately visible but are no less real in their impact. Consent to pregnancy is not just biological. It is relational and contextual, shaped by what a person understands to be true about their circumstances, their partner and their future. When that foundation is deliberately manipulated, consent is not intact, even if it appears to be.
And yet, our systems continue to struggle to hold this.
Legal and policy frameworks are still catching up to forms of harm that do not present as a single moment, but instead unfold as a pattern or strategy, where reality has been shaped by the perpetrator in a way that removes genuine choice while maintaining the appearance of it. This gap is not incidental, it reflects a broader discomfort in naming forms of violence that sit at the intersection of intimacy, autonomy and control.
It also reflects the limits of systems that were built to respond to discrete incidents, rather than patterns of behaviour that unfold over time. Tragically, this is not a fringe issue. It has now been raised at the highest levels of policy debate internationally. In the UK Parliament, reproductive coercion has been explicitly identified as a form of controlling behaviour that exists in law but remains inconsistently recognised and rarely prosecuted in practice.
This means people are left navigating fragmented responses, where health, legal and social systems do not consistently recognise reproductive coercion as central to violence against women. It is treated as peripheral, if it is recognised at all. Socially, we mirror this minimisation. We shift our attention to the woman and ask “why she didn’t know”, “why she didn’t leave”, “why she didn’t see it”, instead of asking what was withheld, what was constructed, and what power was operating in the background to shape her understanding of what was real.
Recently, Australian artist Liv Nervo spoke publicly about her experience of deception leading to pregnancy. Her story has drawn attention, but it has also surfaced a familiar discomfort, because this is where the conversation becomes more complicated and, for many, harder to hold.
As Liv described it:
“I feel like my womb was hijacked. My life derailed, my future taken from me. And ultimately my child is the biggest victim. My trust in the world, and in the systems meant to protect us, has been shot.”
There is a clarity in that statement that cuts through abstraction. It names not only the personal impact, but the failure of systems that are supposed to provide protection and recourse.
It also brings us to the point where many people instinctively retreat. The conversation often stops when a child is involved, as if the love for a child negates what came before it. However, for some women, including those who have children born from rape, this is not a theoretical tension, it is a daily reality. They love their children. Fiercely. Completely. And they also live with the truth of how those pregnancies occurred.
The problem is not that this is complex. The problem is that we still place the weight of that complexity on women, instead of where it belongs. There is no contradiction in holding love and truth together. The contradiction sits in systems and narratives that refuse to recognise both, because doing so would require a more honest reckoning with how harm operates. When we cannot hold both truths, we do not resolve the tension, we simply silence part of it. And when harm is silenced, it becomes easier to ignore, easier to dismiss, and ultimately, easier to repeat.
This is why the framing matters. If reproductive coercion continues to be treated as ambiguous or incidental, it will continue to be missed. And when it is missed, women are left navigating the consequences of decisions that were never freely made, often without recognition, support or protection.
The consequence of this means that opportunities for early interventions are lost. When coercion is not recognised, it is not screened for, not documented, and not responded to in ways that could prevent escalation. Instead, it remains hidden in plain sight, embedded within relationships and systems that are not equipped to name or interrupt it. Naming this form of violence clearly is not about expanding definitions unnecessarily, rather it is about accuracy and accountability. We must recognise that harm does not need to be loud to be real, and that control can operate through the shaping of information, context and belief just as effectively as it can through force.
The requires us to be honest about where responsibility sits and our own bias within that. Because the question is not whether women can hold complexity, they already do, every day.
The question is whether our systems, our laws and our public conversations are willing to catch up, whether we are finally prepared to shift the shame back to where it belongs, because it does not belong to women or their children. It never did.