U.S. Funded Health Search Engine Blocks 'Abortion'

[Ping898]

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/a-government-fu.html

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."


Stephen Goldstein, a spokesman for Johns Hopkins, said he wasn't aware of the censorship, and couldn't immediately comment.
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."

So this is what I don't understand. If it is just a search engine to give access to literature, how is pointing the way to more information actively promoting abortion?

 

[jks9199]

So this is what I don't understand. If it is just a search engine to give access to literature, how is pointing the way to more information actively promoting abortion?

Can't speak for Thursday -- but I ran a search on "abortion" there today, and it worked.

Maybe this wasn't so much a conspiracy or plot as someone being a little overzealous?

 

[Steel Tiger]

Overzealousness is very likely the cause, but i think the root of the problem is that age old adage, "out of sight out of mind". If people can't find information or know about abortion then they will not consider it as an option.

 

[Ninjamom]

I think it's more a case of a blogger just being wrong.

I ran the search on the Popline, and found over 30,000 articles.

 

[Steel Tiger]

I think it's more a case of a blogger just being wrong.

I ran the search on the Popline, and found over 30,000 articles.

I guess if you can't spell you don't find what you are looking for.

 

[jks9199]

I think it's more a case of a blogger just being wrong.

I ran the search on the Popline, and found over 30,000 articles.

Taking the blog article at face value -- there's some documentation that the administrators admitted blocking the search, though you could get around it by using wild-cards.

 

[tellner]

It looks like there's more than a little truth to the rumor:

POPLINE, the world's largest database on reproductive planning (including some 360,000 articles on subjects like fertility and family planning) was recently set to ignore "abortion" as a search term. Yes, you read that right. Administrators programmed the database to treat the word "abortion" the same way it does "a" and "the" -- that is, to pretend it didn't exist.

The reason, of course, was political. POPLINE, which is run out of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the agency best known to the Broadsheet crew for its decision to deny funding to nongovernmental organizations that "perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations" (as the New York Times describes it). The policy was first put into place under President Reagan and revived with President Bush and is, in my opinion, totally screwed up.

...

Luckily, the dean of the school, Dr. Michael J. Klag, agreed that this was incredibly stupid. "I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have directed that the POPLINE administrators restore 'abortion' as a search term immediately,"

The article references stories in the San Francisco Chronicle on the censorship and from Ms. Magazine on its replacement.

In typical Republican fashion it seems that even mentioning the word or looking for scientific information in a database constitutes "promoting". I guess that's why the witch burners and Know Nothings currently in charge are so terribly afraid of science.

 

[Tez3]

Medically speaking an abortion is a pregnancy that has stopped either through illness, accident, spontaenously or deliberately induced as in a termination so censoring the word is pointless. It is a medical term which we have come to associate with a termination done to end an unwanted pregnancy.
I had three miscarriages between my two children, imagine how I felt when I read the word abortion on my med docs, until it was explained to me it was a medical term and doctors and medical staff would know it was a miscarriage.

 

[Ninjamom]

Q: Was the action to block the word taken by a government policy wonk, or by a dbase admin at Johns Hopkins who misunderstood the policy, or feared it might affect jeopardize their funding? Clearly, the local administrator made the decision to include abortion in the search terms, so did a lower level local guy make the decision to ban it?

IOW, who was being overzealous?