Hey, don’t the Chinese do this kind of thing related to “Tibet” and “Tiananmen Square”?
U.S. Funded Health Search Engine Blocks ‘Abortion’ | Threat Level from Wired.com
A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world’s largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word “abortion,” concealing nearly 25,000 search results.
Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It’s funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the federal office in charge of providing foreign aid, including health care funding, to developing nations.
The massive database indexes a broad range of reproductive health literature, including titles like “Previous abortion and the risk of low birth weight and preterm births,” and “Abortion in the United States: Incidence and access to services, 2005.”
But on Thursday, a search on “abortion” was producing only the message “No records found by latest query.”
The database manager says it’s because of federal funding. USAID is forbidden, by executive order, from funding NGOs that perform abortions or “actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.”
“We recently made all abortion terms stop words,” Dickson wrote in a note to Gloria Won, the UCSF medical center librarian making the inquiry. “As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.”
There was no notice of the change on the site.
Dickson suggested other kinds of more obscure search strategies and alternative words to get around the keyword blocking.
This isn’t an advice line, or a political advocacy site. Popline touts itself as “Your connection to the world’s reproductive health literature,” and “the world’s largest database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues. “
Except, of course, if you try to find them using the “A” word.
Whether this is an excellent example of the “chilling effect” (folks self-censoring for fear of breaking the rules), or of the Bush Administration once again demonstrating its desire to reframe scientific information only in acceptable ideological limits, it’s outrageous.
What do they not understand about educating people to make the right choices. If people actually knew what the abortion process was like they probably wouldn’t look forward to having one.
Me personally I don’t care if people have an abortion, it’s their body and their choice. I just wish we promoted contraception, morning after pill, and other means to not getting pregnant. I think this would do more to lower abortion rates than anything else such as bans and not educating people.
Yes, well, the philosophy seems to be that people will never have the chance to make wrong choices if they can only hear about right-thinking choices. Which is darned silly, but … well …
I’m no proponent of abortion (I don’t know anyone who is), and I agree that there are far better ways of *avoiding* pregnancy than terminating it once it happens. But, like you, I’d prefer people make informed health (and moral) decisions about it.
But the odd thing here is, that’s all beside the point. I doubt many, if any, people are going to Popline for family planning advice, or to find the number of their local Planned Parenthood clinic or something. This is, ostensibly, an academic research site, a clearinghouse for technical / medical science information. That’s what makes this particularly vexing to me.