It’s been an interesting couple of days.

Whilst I understand talking about the “a” word again risks inflaming exhausted discussion and more debate, I feel I have to address what ensued after I posted my In the news: Alabama abortion debate article.

At the time of writing, my Instagram post alone has over 3,000 likes and 143 comments, was re-shared 804 times and saved to people’s personal Instagram collections 726 times. I had 2,597 profile visits via this image, 146 website visits and reached 70,607 people who were not following me.

That’s quite a jump from my usual 21 likes and two re-shares from me and my wonderful mother.

The internet opened me up to all sorts of delightful people making delightful comments too.

I’ve been called a baby murderer, child killer and asked if I was mentally challenged. One person said to me that if I kept my pants on, the issue of abortion wouldn’t be a factor. I was told that women shouldn’t be allowed to make the choice anyway, was called dumb and selfish, told that I was whinging, to “fuck your body n**ga” and that I was an anxious and depressed 24/7 blogger with nothing better to do. Someone else told me that my body belongs to my potential future baby and not myself, and to go look up a live abortion online to see how by supporting the legalisation of abortion, I am in fact, murdering babies.

Despite some of the awful things aimed at me and other pro-choice supporters, I have zero motherfucking regrets.
Z-E-R-O.

If anything, my desire to speak out on other important issues has become inflamed more than ever. Whilst talking about the superficial and somewhat unimportant things in my life will still happen, I have a burning desire to touch on other important issues close to my heart. And that is kind of terrifying because I saw a side to humans I usually only see on threads about Kim Kardashian and others in the public eye.

Having a public platform is scary.

Voicing your opinion, sharing your life, posting personal photos, is scary. Humans can be nasty, horrible, awful, abusive, arrogant, ignorant and unwavering in their aggressive nature. They will write words and not even think twice before posting them. Having being given only the smallest of tastes of what it can be like, already I get why so many people don’t read their comments, block people or give up social media altogether.

Don’t get me wrong, it can also be a wonderful place.

I am proud of my friends and family who went in to bat, who had intelligent and civil conversations with those who had differing opinions and who walked away when others starting shit-stirring purely for the fun of it. It’s sometimes tempting to yell senseless abuse at a complete stranger via social media (trust me, I felt the urge in recent days), so the fact that so many chose to ignore those purely commenting to ‘poke the bear’ was admirable.

I don’t really know what the point of this post was, other than to debrief about my whirlwind of a weekend (I also saw the Book of Mormon amongst all this and it was fantastic). Thanks again to everyone who got involved in my latest post, the good and yes, even the not so good. Because it’s just made me want to do it more.

Han x