Department of Health and Human Services removes words lesbian and bisexual from website
The man required medical attention (Getty)
The United States Department of Health and Human Services has removed all mention of lesbian and bisexual women from its website.
The website, named WomensHealth.gov, saw that references to lesbian and bi health were removed over the course of a month in September and October 2017, according to a joint report by the Sunlight Foundation’s Web Integrity Project and shared with POLITICO.
The website is one of the most visited health department websites for women in the country.
Its traffic showed that it received 700,000 visits over the past month.
(Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
“We’ve seen nothing this targeted at one HHS site,” Bergman said. “The removal of lesbian and bisexual health materials in particular, without advance notice and in a targeted way, raise concerns that they’ve targeted information for vulnerable populations.”
In defence of the move, the HSS has said that the removals are down to a “routine update”.
“The outdated lesbian and bisexual health pages were removed and the health content was integrated into the relevant health topics pages across the website,” an HHS spokesperson said to Politico.
None of the material has been revised since this time.
The heading ‘bisexual and lesbian health’ has been removed from the website, and not a single tweet about lesbian and bisexual health has been sent since 2016.
