Mere weeks after a federal judge ruled that U.S. Food and Drug Administration wrongfully approved the dangerous pill responsible for more than half of the nation’s abortions, the pro-life organization at the center of the legal battle over abortion drug survived a series of hacks designed to undermine the group’s credibility.
The cyberattackers first targeted the American College of Pediatricians’ “key technology structures, databases, and our financial accounts” and successfully breached at least one of the organization’s archived websites on April 24. During this malicious online assault, approximately 10,000 once-secure Google Drive documents detailing the ACP’s donors, supporters, and beliefs were wrongfully made vulnerable.
Before ACP could lock down the archived website, these documents were “leaked,” as the Daily Signal first reported, to left-wing technology publication Wired. By Tuesday, Wired published an article smearing the ACP for its common sense views that marriage is between a man and a woman, sex cannot be changed, and babies in the womb have a right to life.
ACP eventually regained control of its website, but just two days after Wired’s article was published, hackers once again tried to infiltrate the ACP’s “email distribution platform.”
“This attack was intended to intimidate and incapacitate, and it will be costly to recover, but we will not be intimidated by these illegal bullying tactics that amount to a hate crime. We will continue to promote the health and well-being of children by protecting the rights of born and preborn children, promoting biological integrity, and defending conscience rights for healthcare professionals,” ACP Executive Director Dr. Jill Simons said in a statement.
Simons told The Daily Signal that she “contacted law enforcement agencies after the hack, including the FBI,” but did not say whether they plan to investigate the origins of the breach.
Cyberattacks are just one of the many ways pro-lifers have faced extreme violence and crime for their beliefs in recent months. Last year, after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, violent abortion advocates wreaked havoc on more than 100 pro-life organizations, pregnancy centers, and churches across the country.
Instead of prioritizing the arrest and prosecution of the vandals smashing windows, graffitiing walls, and setting fire to pro-life property, the FBI focused its efforts on arresting pro-life father Mark Houck, who was recently acquitted of all the Biden administration’s trumped-up charges.
The ACP is one of several pro-life organizations that make up the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine which formally alleged in a federal lawsuit last year that the FDA wrongfully used accelerated drug approval authority in 2000 to endorse mifepristone without studying the detrimental and fatal effects it has on women and babies.
