A whistleblower website for the heartbeat law of Texas is said to be inaccessible.
ProLifeWhistleblower.com is created by Texas Right to Life, an evangelical Christian group. The website cannot be accessed as many internet users flooded it with false reports and even posted pornography to make the website inoperative.
Further, the two website providers where the website was launched said that ProLifeWhistleblower.com violated some of their privacy policies.
The main goal of the whistleblower website is to have people anonymously report about anyone who might be violating the controversial heartbeat law. The law, which was recently passed, does not allow an abortion for Texan women after reaching six weeks of pregnancy.
The website was initially launched through the host GoDaddy. According to it, the website was taken down as it “violated privacy policies.” GoDaddy has a policy where websites it hosts cannot share third-party personal information, including data related to medical issues like abortion.
ProLifeWhistleblower.com is said to have violated privacy policies as it allows anyone to submit reports, including photos as proof, regarding people they believe are going against the Heartbeat law.
After GoDaddy took it down, the website migrated to another host called Epik, an agency known for providing services to far-right groups.
However, Epik also took it down for “rules violation” — collecting medical data about people looking into abortion. In a statement, Epik said, “We contacted the owner of the domain, who agreed to disable the collection of user submissions on this domain.”
Epik remains the host for ProLifeWhistleblower.com, but whenever people try to access it, they get redirected to Texas Right to Life’s main website.
Ronald Guilmette, a web infrastructure expert, in an interview with The Guardian, said: “For all intents and purposes it is offline. They are having technical difficulties. My personal speculation is that they are going to have trouble keeping it online moving forward.”
Texas Right to Life spokeswoman, Kimberlyn Schwartz, said the website was in the process of moving to a new host but did not disclose further details. Schwartz added that even if there is no website to report violations against the Heartbeat law, the law remains enforced.
Rebecca Parma, Texas Right to Life’s senior legislative associate, also released a statement thanking people who gave fake reports to the website because it gave “publicity to the website that’s coming from all of this chatter about it.”
