“I hope you die during childbirth. You should be sterilised.”
These were just some of the comments blogger and business woman, Constance Hall found herself reading following her ‘controversial’ pregnancy announcement last week.
Admittedly, Hall is no stranger to people saying horrible things about her on the internet. She knows her brand of honesty is polarising, to put it politely.
So why did she decide to knowingly open herself up to such a barrage of online criticism?
On HIT’s The Queen Sesh with Constance Hall and Annaliese, the 33-year-old Perth blogger debriefed on her decision to share the announcement so publicly, and against her management’s advice.
“Because I talk about everything all the time and I don’t hold anything back, so I’d known that I was pregnant for like, three weeks, and I have just felt so dishonest,” Hall told her radio show co-host, Annaliese Dent.
“I have managers and PR people who said ‘I can’t believe you wrote that’ and ‘there should’ve been a strategic time when you said that’, but I just can’t help myself. I said, please can I go back to being honest now? It was giving me anxiety.
Addressing her abortion reference – ‘I’m hormonal, I considered having an abortion this morning because Densy slept in,’ Hall wrote in her original Facebook post – the blogger explained that, really, that comment shouldn’t have been shocking to anyone who follows her. Or, any excuse for trolls to send her death threats.
“Some people might’ve thought it was insensitive but hello, it shouldn’t be shocking to anybody. And it was a joke, but there was an element of truth to it, I sat down and thought, ‘can I do this?’ do I want to do this… And that’s just who I am, and I talk so candidly about these things with you and on my Facebook.
“I know some people get triggered by that sort of stuff, so I went back and commented, ‘come on guys’ because some people had said ‘I feel sorry for your unborn child who’ll go back and read this one day’ but, if it ever is dusting off old articles, it doesn’t matter because my mum was really open with me about her abortions and the things she was feeling, and I respected her as a woman. These are our choices and these are the things we have to live with.