Searches for “abortion” on Popline blocked

By Michael Fraase

Saturday, 05 April 2008 09:36AM CST

Section: Censorship

USAIDNever mind that abortion is still, tenuously, legal in the US. The federally-funded reproductive health search engine, Popline, run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has blocked searches for “abortion.” Almost 25,000 documents are censored as a result.

The website is funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Sarah Lai Stirland reports for Wired that “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 Johns Hopkins spokesperson told Stirland he wasn’t aware of the censorship and wouldn’t comment.

The censorship was discovered by a librarian at the University of California, San Francisco during a routine research request (bless librarians, again). The librarian contacted the manager of the Johns Hopkins database who confirmed the censorship in an email: “As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.” Nothing like preemptive censorship in the face of possible funding cuts. Shame on Johns Hopkins.

Update: Saturday, 05 April 2008 10:30AM CDT: According to Robert Pear’s report in this morning’s New York Times, Johns Hopkins has removed the “abortion” block from the Popline database, on the orders of the dean of the School of Public Health.

Pear reports that USAID employees “had expressed concern after finding ‘two articles about abortion advocacy’ in the database,” indicating there was some provocation for the censorship. A spokesperson told Pear that the two articles in question “did not fit database criteria and were removed.”

Permalink | (0) Comments

Page 1 of 1 pages