Fatimah Gifford was nervous the day she was scheduled to testify in front of Texas’ Health and Human Services committee. Gifford is the VP of Communications for Whole Woman’s Health, which operates five reproductive healthcare clinics across Texas. This wasn’t her first time testifying before the state legislature, but it was her first time testifying about abortion.

“I entered into this with eyes wide open, and knowing that I was more than likely going to be devoured up in there,” she says.

Given her job, Gifford is no stranger to high-pressure environments, but she was unprepared for what came next. She slowly walked to the podium, introduced herself, and read her testimony against House Bill 2, a sweeping piece of legislation that laid out some of the harshest abortion restrictions in the country.

When she finished, a committee member laid into her. He denounced her for marketing and promoting abortion, and criticized the organization’s website for its professional appearance because it helped “sell” abortions. He also read the organization’s URL— www.wholewomanshealth.com—out loud.

“It was like he mockingly invited people to go to our site and mess with us and made sure our web address made it into public record,” says Amy Hagstrom Miller, the founder and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health. Which is precisely what happened.

Later that day, Whole Woman’s Health noticed a surge in hacking attempts through routine monitoring of web activity. A few days after, the staff couldn’t log into the website. One of the intrusive efforts had succeeded, and shut the website down for a week.

It was just the beginning of the onslaught of cyberattacks that Whole Woman’s Health would experience between June 2013 and April 2016, as the organization continued to fight a legal battle over abortion that went all the way to the Supreme Court.

The battle lines around abortion in the US have been clearly drawn for decades. Protesters, ranging from handfuls to hundreds, stake territory outside clinics to pray, wave signs, and yell into loudspeakers. On the legislative front, politicians have enacted hundreds of Targeted Restrictions of Abortion Providers laws since 2010 that make it difficult for women to access abortion care, and cause clinics to close down.

Over the past few years, though, a new front has emerged that many reproductive healthcare organizations struggle to deal with. Cyberattacks and threats, as well as internet harassment, have escalated, aiming to disrupt services, intimidate providers and patients, and prevent women from getting the care they need.

After the initial attack, Whole Woman’s Health hired a cybersecurity specialist to remove the malware and repair the damage that had been done. Still, Hagstrom Miller says, the site suffered more than 500 hacking attempts each day in the wake of Gifford’s testimony. About a month later, hackers found and exploited a vulnerability in the Whole Woman’s Health blog, which gave them a backdoor to the entire website.

The second successful attack shut down the site for a month. Without it, potential patients were unable to find the clinics, make appointments, identify hours, locations, and services provided, and ask questions.

“The damage was awful,” Gifford said. “Our phones literally stopped ringing. It was devastating. Most of our patients find us online, so with no website and no Google advertising, it made day-to-day awareness nearly impossible.”

After that attack, Whole Woman’s Health switched to a more secure hosting provider, and rebuilt every single page on its website, around 100 in all. These measures allowed the organization to better track the cyberthreats as they came in, but didn’t stop them. As Whole Woman’s Health continued to speak out in support of abortion rights, hackers continued to strike.

'The damage was awful. Our phones literally stopped ringing. It was devastating.' — Amy Hagstrom Miller, Whole Women's Health

On April 2, 2014, the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit on behalf of five Texas clinics challenging HB2, and Whole Woman’s Health became the lead plaintiff. The case wound its way through the lower courts until the Supreme Court issued its decision in 2016. Throughout this multi-year process, Hagstrom Miller emerged as an outspoken advocate for reproductive rights. Every time she went on MSNBC or CNN to talk about the case, Whole Woman’s Health experienced a surge in hacking attempts. In one subsequent attack, hackers rerouted visitors to Whole Woman’s Health website to a pornographic page.