Vilified by Twitter bullies, woman who dared to say: I never want to have a baby
SHE knew that as a young woman her desire to be sterilised and never have children was controversial.
But when 29- year- old Holly Brockwell shared her views in the hope of sparking debate, she had no idea of the tide of vitriol that awaited her online.
Twitter trolls branded her ‘selfish’, made scathing remarks about her appearance and issued thinly veiled threats against her.
The onslaught was so terrifying that she had to abandon Twitter and spent her evening in tears at the nastiness directed at her.
One wrote: ‘Horrible, self-righteous, don’t give a t*** about anyone else woman.’ Others accused her of being a ‘media whore’ for giving interviews about her views.
Miss Brockwell faced an almost immediate backlash after her article was published online last weekend.
‘The piece went up in the middle of the night,’ she said.
‘But within 30 minutes I was already getting concerned about the volume of messages and how many of them were negative. By midday on Sunday, there were messages on my email, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and even my Instagram.
‘They were everywhere. One guy even managed to call me through Facebook. I got lots of tweets suggesting I was mentally ill for not wanting to have children as a woman. Some said I should be sectioned.
‘I was going to make a cup of tea and hadn’t even got to the kettle before I broke down crying.’
But after the trolls – many of whom had made direct reference to silencing her in their messages – claimed victory, she went back online.
Miss Brockwell, who wrote her article as part of the BBC’s 100 Women project, said she felt it was a personal attack on her as a woman.
‘Some of the words that were used were very specific to women,’ she said. ‘They discussed my face, my body and I felt that they wouldn’t have said the same to a man.’
Miss Brockwell, who also wrote about her desire to be sterilised in the Mail’s Femail section in April, said she was first inspired to talk about her decision after seeing an article listing five reasons to have children. She first requested sterilisation at the age of 26, but she claims that no one takes her wish seriously and that she is constantly told she will change her mind.
She has approached six doctors in her quest to be sterilised and two have referred her to Marie Stopes. The charity said that it had no minimum age for sterilisations but currently had no surgeons to perform the operation.
Miss Brockwell, a journalist who runs Gadgette, a technology website aimed at women, does not have the money to have the operation privately.
The NHS referred her to Marie Stopes and would have been prepared to fund the operation if the charity had agreed to it. In her BBC article, she wrote: ‘The fact is, there is nothing about cre- ating another human being that appeals to me.’
Miss Brockwell, who is single and lives in London, said that she reacted badly to hormonal contraception and did not like the risk of other forms of birth control.
She said that she was very firm about her decision and realised that she had also risked a future relationship by deciding not to have children.
‘It’s been really difficult to find people to date who feel same way,’ she said. ‘I have to bring it up so early because there’s no compromising on it, there’s no middle ground.’
Miss Brockwell said she had resigned herself to being single for the rest of her life because she felt she was unlikely to meet a partner who felt the same way as her.
‘They suggested I was mentally ill’