A publicly financed database at Johns Hopkins University — the largest reproductive health database in the world — censored the word “abortion” from its searches. Why? To avoid having their funding pulled in the current anti-choice, pro-censorship climate. RH Reality Check was on top of this one from the beginning, so check out their coverage; their outcry was key in getting the search restored. Our Bodies Our Blog has more.
The censorship blocked more than 25,000 searches. And this is one more example of how the Global Gag Rule not only impedes health care access and threatens women’s lives, but violates are very basic values of education, access to information and free speech:
Under a Reagan-era policy revived by President Bush in 2001, USAID denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform abortions, or that “actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.”
A librarian at the University of California at San Francisco noticed the new censorship on Monday, while carrying out a routine research request on behalf of academics and researchers at the university. The search term had functioned properly as of January.
Puzzled, she contacted the manager of the database, Johns Hopkins’ Debbie Dickson, who replied in an April 1st e-mail that the university had recently begun blocking the search term because the database received federal funding.
“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.”
After outcry from activists, the word “abortion” has been restored as a search term. There are a lot of morals to this story — the degree to which anti-choicers are willing to go to push their ideological agenda; the invisibility of women’s health concerns; the topsy-turvy world we’re living in when reproductive health funding is contingent on pretending abortion doesn’t exist — but I think my favorite lesson is the one we should have all learned in primary school: Don’t piss off the librarian.