Saturday, June 13, 2009

A Blogging Nightmare?

Although I really have no idea why, we've had occasional hits from a blog called April's Mom . No big deal: we get hits from a lot of different, perhaps unexpected places. The April's Mom blog is (was) written by a young woman who was pregnant with a terminally-ill baby girl; the heart-wrenching, yet inspiring posts chronicled the journey.
Or not.
Turns out, April's Mom was not, in fact pregnant with a terminally ill child. Or any other kind:
Oy.
The blogger behind the blog is a 20-something Chicagoland social worker, who became unable (or unwilling) to stop building on lie after lie. She even received gifts from loyal readers, and prayers from well-wishers (and pro-life advocates). It appears that she really did lose a son, shortly after his birth, in 2005. Why she waited this long to start the April's Mom blog is, at this point anyone's guess.
Actually, it's not all that clear why she started it at all (although it does appear that she hoped to use it as a pro-life advocacy effort).
So, why are we blogging on this?
At its peak, her blog was getting over 14,000 hits a day (hard to believe, but that's even more than we get!). That kind of traffic implies, and in fact generates, a certain amount of credibility. So when a blog that big implodes, it calls into question others, as well.
Regular readers here know that we don't blog anonymously, and there are a number of reasons for that. But the over-arching one is credibility: it's quite easy to post controversial items when one has the shield of anonymity. It's quite another when folks know who (and where) one really is.
Frankly, I wouldn't have it any other way.
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