Blogger ‘Beccah’ Caught in Web of Lies Over Fake Pregnancy; Says Sorry

The woman’s story about giving birth to a child diagnosed while in the womb as terminally ill hit a nerve. Every night for the last two months, thousands of abortion foes from across the nation logged onto a blog run by the woman who said she was unmarried, pregnant and identified herself only as “B” or “April’s Mom.”

In painstaking detail and heartbreaking prose, ablogger, who claimed to be a young single mother, shared with the world the compelling story of carrying to term a baby she said she knew was going to die.
The baby, a girl named April because of the month she was due, was to be born with a rare disorder called holoprosencephaly that would prevent her brain from properly developing, cause her face to be deformed and ultimately result in her early death, the blogger said.

As more people were drawn to the blog — which included biblical quotes, antiabortion messages and a soundtrack of inspirational Christian pop songs — advertisers were queuing up. By the evening of June 7, when the woman blogged that April Rose had survived a home birth only to die hours later, her website had nearly 1 million hits.

There was only one problem with the unfolding tragedy: None of it was true. Though she described visits with her doctors, plans for her delivery and posted pictures of herself and eventually the baby — who she said was born weeks late last Sunday and died hours later — it was all a lie.

The baby in the photos, swaddled in white blankets, was a doll.

“I lied and I am not trying to hide that, nor am I trying to minimize it,” she apologized in a blog post. “Worse still, I lied to a community of people whose only intention was to support me through this time and that is wrong, and for that I am sorrier than you could know.”

At first “April’s Mom” asked only for her readers’ prayers. And they came in droves; not just from readers caught up in a riveting real life drama, or from Christians who celebrated her story as an anti-abortion parable, but from mothers of sick and dying children who wanted to commiserate and lend their support. But soon, April’s Mom asked for more than just prayers. She posted a P.O. Box, to which readers could send gifts or money and on the side of the page where there was once only a form for submitting well-prayers emerged a list of advertisements.

It wass the photo of the baby that eventually unraveled the entire lie. “It wasn’t a photo of a baby at all, it was a doll,” said Elizabeth Russell, a mother and maker of lifelike Reborn Dolls, who shed light on the hoax. “I have that same doll. I’ve made that doll enough times that there was no mistaking it. I couldn’t believe what she was trying to pull. It’s outrageous that she would manipulate people like that,” said Russell.

The blog owner, now known as Beccah Beushausen, a 26-year-old from Mokena, Ill., started her blog in March to help deal with that loss and to express her antiabortion views, she said. She had ony expected only a handful of friends to read it, but when her first post got 50 comments, she was hooked. “I’ve always liked writing. It was addictive to find out I had a voice that people wanted to hear,” she said. “Soon I was getting 100,000 hits a week, and it just got out of hand. I didn’t know how to stop. . . . One lie led to another.”

When she realized she had been exposed, Beushausen quickly took down the blog, and apparently tried to erase her digital identity from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

In an apology letter she sent to ABC to head off a Good Morning America story on her, she claimed that while her account of Baby April was a lie, she made a second claim of thwarted motherhood — that she was “no stranger to losing a baby.”

“I know what I did was wrong,” she said. “I’ve been getting hate mail. I’m sorry because people were so emotionally involved.”

Across the country, people are horrified by this story. Beccah and her story have outraged everyone from anti-abortionists, to the Christian community, not to mention thousands of parents and especially those who have suffered from miscarriages, still births, or babies with any type of birth defect. Concern over mother’s ‘crying wolf’ over their babies is now being felt.

What do you think of Beccah and what she did? Leave us your comments.

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