Rule #1: Don't step on your own message

Today, like many days, I spent a fair part of the early morning looking for things to RT on Twitter. I'm not the type of person that feels the need to share that they just got out of the shower or stopped to get a cup of coffee, etc. so I often look for interesting things on Twitter and Facebook to share with my small community of friends. When I first signed up for Twitter, I also used it as an opportunity to follow really interesting conversations and this morning I found a doozy.

On AmandaMarcotte's twitter page, I discovered "http://bit.ly/140wlI The miscarriage link was broken earlier, but now it's fixed. Tweet your miscarriage!"

Say what? Tweet your miscarriage? Turns out Amanda's tweet was actually a retweet from Penelope Trunk, a communications professional and founder of Brazen Careerist.

Essentially, Trunk wrote a 140-character observation about how her work and personal lives were intertwined. While she was at a board meeting, she was experiencing a miscarriage. Nothing particularly shocking about that. We should be able to talk (in whatever form) about our lives, our bodies, how to balance things and we shouldn't be ashamed or need to hide some of the darker issues.

So, on first glance, I thought nothing of the tweet, or it's message. And then I read the second half of the tweet, which was a brazen, throw-away line about abortion.

Unfortunately, it also short-circuited an interesting conversation about "our bodies, ourselves". So few people take on the next layer of challenges that women face as we try to balance work and career, especially the ugly physical parts. Too many of my friends worked thru their pregnancies with hemorrhoids, bladder control issues, sciatica, and so much more. How great to have someone introduce the physicality of being a woman into the conversation.

Furthermore, having never read her blog before, I clicked around her site and found the overwhelming majority of her posts to be clever, informative, interesting and compelling. Like Amanda or Jessica Valenti or others in the feminist blogosphere, hers is unique and intelligent voice for women.

Except for that line. With it, she broke the first rule of communications: don't step on your own message. She then broke the second, don't repeat the charge. She willingly stepped in the abortion debate on their terms by once again being one of those women that don't take the emotion tied to that issue seriously enough.

This could marginalize her message going forward. She may always be the woman who tweeted about her miscarriage and abortion. Which is disappointing, for us all, as she has so many more interesting things to say.