What abortion? Where?
Until yesterday, on the reproductive health database Popline, run by Johns Hopkins University and funded by USAID, the Agency for International Development, it was not possible to run a search for the term "abortion." Oh, there are articles about abortion in the database, but if you wanted to find them, you had to use obscure controlled vocabulary like, "fertility control, postconception” or “pregnancy, unwanted," because the database was programmed to treat the word "abortion" as a stop word, like "a" or "the," basically a non-searchable term. When asked why this was done, the Popline manager said, "As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now." Translation: We decided that ideology is more important than information, despite the fact that information is our fucking business.
Now, I have no idea if the government exerted direct pressure on Johns Hopkins in this matter, or if Johns Hopkins was acting preemptively based on things like the Global Gag Rule , reinstated by Bush on his first day in office, which denies funding to foreign NGOs that so much as say the word abortion.
Fortunately, after librarians at the Medical Center of the University of California, San Fransisco wondered why they couldn't find any articles about abortion on the world's largest reproductive health database, the Dean of the Public Health school at Johns Hopkins became aware of the restriction and ordered it to be reversed. A search for "abortion" on Popline now returns over 26,000 results.
Granted, the restriction was only put in place in February, and someone caught it and lifted it fairly soon, but if an institution as supposedly reputable, objective, and scientific as Johns Hopkins will cave to ideological pressure, who else will? And how will we know about it?
Now, I have no idea if the government exerted direct pressure on Johns Hopkins in this matter, or if Johns Hopkins was acting preemptively based on things like the Global Gag Rule , reinstated by Bush on his first day in office, which denies funding to foreign NGOs that so much as say the word abortion.
Fortunately, after librarians at the Medical Center of the University of California, San Fransisco wondered why they couldn't find any articles about abortion on the world's largest reproductive health database, the Dean of the Public Health school at Johns Hopkins became aware of the restriction and ordered it to be reversed. A search for "abortion" on Popline now returns over 26,000 results.
Granted, the restriction was only put in place in February, and someone caught it and lifted it fairly soon, but if an institution as supposedly reputable, objective, and scientific as Johns Hopkins will cave to ideological pressure, who else will? And how will we know about it?