HHS cut all lesbian and bisexual resources from its website – and it’s still down six months later

Resources for lesbian and bisexual Americans have been stripped from the government health website, a new report has confirmed.

The page which once contained substantial information about lesbian and bisexual health, and all external links, quietly disappeared from the Health and Human Services website in September 2017, and is still down six months later.

What’s more, the subhead of ‘lesbian and bisexual health’ has been removed from the drop-down menu. 

Although the section was long overdue an update, with the last edit made in 2012, public health advocates say it was a crucial platform providing some assistance to a largely under-served community.

Lesbian, gay and bisexual Americans have poorer heart health, higher suicide risks, and higher rates of obesity and smoking than heterosexuals.

It is a bleak reality that experts attribute to deep-rooted discrimination in the US healthcare system, making it harder to get insurance, rarer to be treated with dignity, and more difficult to access relevant resources if the patient is not heterosexual.

This is what users are met with now if they try to find lesbian and bisexual resources on the HHS Women’s Health website

The defunct webpage was once a source analyzing the specific health risk factors for lesbian and bisexual women, and the challenges they face in the healthcare system.

There was no announcement that it had disappeared from the HHS website but some people started to report it.

Eventually researchers at the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit government watchdog group, sought to investigate what happened to the page, a subset of the HHS Women’s Health site, which receives 700,000 views a month. 

They found, as expected, the link now leads to a ‘page not found’ error page, and there was no mention of a ‘lesbian and bisexual health’ page on the site. 

The HHS claims the page has been removed momentarily so it can be updated to provide the most up-to-date information for citizens.

The Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA) said that sounds like a pithy excuse. 

‘The erasure of lesbian and bisexual health content from WomensHealth.gov is tantamount to discrimination against a vulnerable population that already suffers significant health disparities and discrimination in healthcare,’ the group’s president Gal Mayer, MD, MS, said in a statement. 

‘In removing these resources, HHS restricts the ability of sexual minority women to access critical information designed to help them improve their health outcomes and get the quality care they deserve.’

Dr Mayer added that it follows other measures taken by the Trump-lead HHS to ‘dismantle LGBTQ health initiatives over the past year’, and called on health professionals to fight back against the changes. 



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