the category of "Best Dramatic Performance" for "Den's Return". At the 2005 Inside Soap awards, Dean was presented with the coveted award for outstanding achievement as homage to her work in EastEnders; at the time of the awards ceremony, she had appeared in EastEnders (on and off) for over 20 years. She was also nominated in the category of Best Couple (shared with Nigel Harman). Dean was nominated for "Best Actress" for the Inside Soap Awards 2014. In November 2018, Sharon's pairing with Keanu was nominated for Best Soap Couple at the 2018 Digital Spy Reader Awards; they came in ninth place with 4% of the total votes. In 2001, a storyline that saw Sharon confessing to her lover Phil that she was infertile was discussed in The Guardian by Jenni Murray. Of interest to the journalist was Sharon's declaration that she had become infertile because she aborted Grant's baby in 1995, and although the abortion was successful, she did not take a post-op course of anti-biotics; it was a subsequent infection that left her infertile. Of concern to Murray was the deleterious effect that broadcasting such a negative outcome of abortion may have on any female viewers considering the procedure. Murray stated: "It's easy to see why infertility as a result of abortion is manna from heaven to writers hungry for dramatic storylines. Could there be any greater irony than to abort the foetus of one man [Grant], fall in love with his brother [Phil], long to have his child and then find that the dire consequences of the first action deprive you of the delights of the second [...] But how much poetic licence has to be employed to service these plots in which women are consistently punished for exercising their legal right to choose to abort a foetus they don't want to carry? In Sharon's case because she was running away from a violent man". Discussing the matter, Ann Furedi of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service confirmed a relatively high risk of infection from abortion, but opined that any good service provides anti-biotics and screens for chlamydia, so the risks are manageable, and the risks of hysterectomy are so rare as to be "negligible". Furedi said that women who consider abortion often feel ambivalent, guilty and have an exaggerated sense of the risks to their future fertility and she suggested that TV makers were "cruel, not just