As part of the incoming Trump administration’s purge of information they would rather people not have access to, the website reproductiverights.gov has been taken offline, as first spotted by CBS News.
The site was launched by the Biden administration in 2022 following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, upending federal protections that granted people the right to access abortions. The site, which was operated by the Department of Health and Human Services, offered information on abortion rights, informing people on what type of care is available to them and how to advocate for access to that care. It also offered information on a number of other sexual and reproductive health services including breast and cervical cancer screenings, prenatal care, and HIV screenings. While an archived version of the site is accessible through the Internet Archive, the information is no longer hosted on the dedicated federal domain.
With the overturning of Roe, laws regarding abortion care are left up to the states—meaning that access varies wildly depending on where a person lives. Per the Guttmacher Institute, 41 states have some restrictions on abortion access, including 12 that have a total ban on the health service. Access can vary depending on how far into the gestational process a person is, and exceptions may or may not be available.
It’s the exact type of situation in which you would want a regularly updated database that provides easy-to-navigate and understand care options maintained by experts. So of course, that’s gone now.
This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Trump led a similar purge of science-based information hosted on government websites during his first term, targeted primarily at information about climate change. During his first day in office back in 2017, he deleted all mentions of climate change from whitehouse.gov, removed pages related to climate change from the websites of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Energy, and basically tried to bury any suggestion that climate change was happening or would have an impact on people. Luckily, if you ignore it, it does just go away…right?
Anyway, the reality is that reproductiverights.gov and other federal sites coming down is a bit of virtue signaling from the Trump administration. It’s not the website that dictates the reality of reproductive rights, and there are lots of third parties like Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the Guttmacher Institute that provide actionable information for those seeking abortion care. Hell, you can still find abortion rights information on government websites thanks to people like Congressman Dan Goldman of New York, who maintains a list of resources for his constituents.
But the decision to take down the site on day one does show where the priorities of this administration lie. The Spanish-language pages for the White House happened to come down yesterday, too, as did pages referencing LGBTQ rights. If you want to know who is in the crosshairs, just look at who is having their access to information cut off.
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