Sophia Weaver is a remarkably strong 9-year-girl who has been through countless medical problems. The little girl was born with a number of deformities to her ligaments as well as her face.
One year after she was born, doctors also diagnosed her with a rare neurological disorder called Rett syndrome, which hinders the natural growth and development of the brain and prevents her from having motor and language functions.
In other words, Sophia can’t talk and can barely move.
Her loving family cares for her every single hour of the day, and Sophia also gets a lot of support from her two siblings. Mom Natalie says that while dealing with Sophia’s condition is anything but easy, she’s happy and strong.
“She’s had 22 surgeries,” her mom explained to CNN. “She has a feeding tube. A colostomy bag. She has seizures and choking spells because of both the deformities and the Rett syndrome.”
Natalie is a health care activist, and she was inspired after the birth of Sophia to spread awareness about disabilities. She gets inspired by Sophia every single day and calls her an amazing girl.
Unfortunately, Natalie was the victim of constant online harassment.
She received horrifying messages from multiple online people who targeted Sophia.
“People, they seek you out and want to hurt you,” Natalie said. “There are people who go out of their way to make sure you see their cruelty. I get people telling me to kill my child, to put her out of her misery.”
“Letting this baby live like this is extremely selfish (…) and downright bad parenting,” one of the abusive posts said.
Natalie reported these absolutely horrible messages to Twitter, but they didn’t want to remove the harassing posts at first. The woman became absolutely furious when someone posted a picture of her daughter as a poster child for abortion. To make things even worse, the woman was even tagged in this post.
The woman immediately blocked the message in disgust and asked her followers and friends on Twitter to report the message as well.
“I blocked it. I just hoped it was gone,” she recalls. “But it was never removed. The account remained.”
Remarkably, the tweet was still online after a few days, and the harassers kept on going and going with more hateful messages.
“She will live a miserable life and be a burden on the family and society. Civilization does not run on feels,” it said.
“#ISHUDNTHAVETOPAYFORIT” someone else wrote.
Even after thousands of reports from her followers, the harassment tweets were still online. Natalie decided to tell her story to a local news station, in the hopes that she could spread the word and urge the social network platform to take the posts offline.
Her plan worked. Twitter removed the posts a couple of days later and issued an apology.
After a lot of local and domestic media coverage, Natalie finally won the battle and hopes that hate speech against disabilities will be a thing of the past on Twitter.
“[They said] they made a mistake. Twitter had it in their policy to protect people with disabilities against hate.”
“Twitter needs to add people with disabilities as a category in their violation reporting,” she added. “Otherwise people don’t know the appropriate category to select for hate towards people with disabilities.”
Natalie keeps on fighting as an activist for her non-profit organization Advocates for Medically Fragile Kids, which wants to help families with affordable medical care.
“Without health care, my daughter would die,” she says.
Concluding, Natalie wants to spread a heartwarming message. She admits that caring for someone with serious disabilities is incredibly difficult, sometimes painful and very emotional. However, love is worth it.
“I think many times, people don’t even view Sophia is a person,” Natalie says. “I know it happens with other people with disabilities. And people view her as a disability, but I just want them to look at her as my child.”
“We have to deal with so many challenges, but because of her my life is better,” Weaver says. “I know what true happiness is.”
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