In Her Shoes: Page sharing abortion stories bombarded by abusive trolls
Women in Ireland face 14 years in prison for seeking a termination except in situations where the life of the mother is 100pc at risk.
This, coupled with the decades of ingrained social stigma attached to abortion here, have led women to procure the appropriate healthcare abroad or self-induce terminations through online tablets.
In Her Shoes, a Facebook page set up to share stories of Irish women who have sough terminations, has been giving real-life accounts of the realities surrounding abortion.
The page, which has over 54,000 members, was bombarded last night by Save the 8th accounts, who left abusive comments and low-star reviews.
The comments generally claimed that the In Her Shoes stories were 'feminist propaganda' and were spreading 'misinformation.'
'I believe women should have a choice, many choices however Abortion is not a choice, it's a moral issue, and like slavery it is morally wrong. We can all justify anything with wiley words,' read one 1-star review.
'All unborn children deserve a chance at life. God will judge those destroy his creation. I don't hate women but I hate the act of abortion and it's disgusting to kill unborn children because you couldn't make the right choice not to have sex,' read another.
In retaliation, pro-choice supporters began leaving their own reviews of the page, giving it five stars to combat the hate being spread by the descending troll accounts.
A number of community members were left temporarily locked out of their accounts after the trolling.
'Yesterday, pro-life accounts had been spamming and trolling numerous conversations within the In Her Shoes community,' reads a post from the page admin.
'Because this caused upset within the pro-life 'love both' movement, they devised an attempt, along with their pro-life organisations in the US to remove the page by trying to flood it with 1 star reviews, privately messaging individual commenters, and/or reporting individual commenters and this page as spam.'
