A popular women’s health website maintained by the United States Department of Health and Human Services no longer includes LGBT health resources, according to a pair of new reports.
Politico reported this week on two monitoring reports by the Sunlight Foundation’s Web Integrity Project that tracked the HHS website WomensHealth.gov. The organization found a webpage that provided health resources for lesbian and bisexual women had been removed last fall between September and October of 2017.
The website, overseen by the HHS Office on Women’s Health, first posted the pages in 2012. “The outdated lesbian and bisexual health pages were removed and the health content was integrated into the relevant health topics pages across the website,” an HHS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 told Politico, stating the changes were a part of a routine update.
According to the Sunlight Foundation, the “now-missing lesbian and bisexual health content was not integrated elsewhere,” and important issues and questions pertaining to LGBT-specific health care are no longer visible on the website or included in the over 100 different health-care topics listed on the site, Politico reports.
The site had about 700,000 visits this past month and its social media following on Twitter reaches almost one million, making it one of HHS’s most-visited sites.
“The removal of lesbian and bisexual health materials in particular, without advanced notice and in a targeted way, raise concerns that they’ve targeted information for vulnerable populations,” Andrew Bergman, the leader of the study at the Sunlight Foundation, told Politico.
