CDC Site Ominously Redirects Searches For Abortion to Adoption, Even Though That’s… Not How It Works!

Key federal websites are increasingly scrubbing and replacing vital, objective information to push the new administration's far-right agenda—including manipulatively presenting adoption as an alternative for abortion.

By Kylie Cheung  |  February 7, 2025 | 2:57pm
Photo by Mark Reinstein/Corbis via Getty Images AbortionPolitics CDC
CDC Site Ominously Redirects Searches For Abortion to Adoption, Even Though That’s… Not How It Works!

Over the last three weeks, the Trump administration has been carrying out a demolition job to federal websites, temporarily taking at least 12 offline last Friday. The Hill reported on Thursday that, as of this week, a pretty alarming change has been spotted on the CDC’s website: Searches for “abortion” now turn up a note that reads, “Also try: Adoption.” Upon clicking that, users will be redirected to a list of guidelines for families interested in international adoption.

Since Trump took office, the know your rights webpage reproductiverights.gov went dark almost immediately. Nearly all search results for “abortion” were scrubbed from the Health and Human Services Department’s website within days, too. The CDC was among the federal agencies whose websites briefly went dark last week, with key pages about sexual violence temporarily vanishing; the “About Sexual Violence” page is back online, but with an ominous tag up top that reads, “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.” In a similar vein, mentions of queer and trans identity are also being scrubbed from federal websites. 

Experts who spoke to the Hill say that the “adoption” redirect was probably put in place while the CDC’s website went offline last Friday. It’s part-and-parcel of the administration’s broader war on objective information to push a far-right agenda. And, on top of that, this move, which is being celebrated by anti-abortion activists, doesn’t make any sense. “It’s a very strange thing to do because the decision tree around pregnancy is to either continue the pregnancy or not. If the pregnancy is continued, then the decision becomes parenting or not,” Meghan Eagen-Torkko, a reproductive health provider and director of the school of nursing at Eastern Michigan University, told the outlet. “There’s no point in that when abortion and adoption are on the same branch.”

This, in fact, is the subject of Dr. Gretchen Sisson’s 2024 book, Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, the product of over a decade of research into the U.S. adoption industry that anti-abortion activists obsessively frame as an “alternative” to abortion. Relinquished cites a bevy of surveys that show almost no overlap between people who seek abortion and people who seek adoption. Those who seek abortion don’t want to be pregnant, period; those who seek adoption often want to parent, but don’t have the means in a country with a nonexistent social safety net. 

The “perpetual error” that politicians make is lumping the two together, Sisson told Jezebel last year. And as politicians across the political spectrum almost universally glorify the adoption industry, they bury the coercive and dishonest tactics deployed by most adoption agencies, as well as the psychological impacts of adoption on birth mothers. The CDC’s current search engine certainly doesn’t include any information about this. 

Trump repeatedly lied on the campaign trail that he wouldn’t further restrict abortion if elected, and it seems enough people believed him. But predictably enough, since taking office, he pardoned nearly a dozen anti-abortion activists who physically blockaded and terrorized abortion clinics, and directed his Justice Department to relax protections for these clinics, effectively encouraging violent anti-abortion activists to mobilize. And he reinstated the “global gag rule” to defund any global organizations that offer abortion care or even information about it. On top of all of this, the alarming changes to federal websites aren’t just cosmetic tweaks—they’re a real-time rewriting of reality to take options away from as many women and pregnant people as possible.

 
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