The Database Gag Rule
As many of you may have already seen in the headlines, the “largest scientific database for reproductive health“, POPLINE, messed up- big time.
A couple months ago, the database managed by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health had received a complaint from the federal government. Apparently POPLINE, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), had been taking some heat because of two abortion advocacy related articles that were found on the site. Solution? Remove the term completely. Administrators decided late February to simply block the word ‘abortion’ from providing any search results. Of course, the change was quickly noticed by users of the site. Medical librarians at the University of California, San Francisco e-mailed administrators about it. Gail Sorrough, UCSF director of medical library services, said, “..the POPLINE administrator replied that, yes, they had decided to turn the term abortion into a ’stop word’” and librarians were told to use other terms in the search field, such as “unwanted pregnancy” or “fertility control, post-conception” instead.
Once news of the ban became known, Johns Hopkins quickly condemned the decision and had the restriction lifted immediately. Dean Michael J. Klag of the school for Public Health has launched an inquiry for the incident and said in a “statement”, “… [I] have directed that the POPLINE administrators restore “abortion” as a search term immediately. I will also launch an inquiry to determine why this change occurred. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction.”
POPLINE’S course of action was indeed a very odd decision and in no way excusable considering that abortion is a very legal medical procedure (did we mention that the project defines itself as ‘the world’s largest database on reproductive health and dedicated to reports on family planning and health issues’?). USAID insists that it had no hand in the decision to change search restrictions- when asked whether USAID requested to remove “abortion” as a search term, the Office of Population and Reproductive Health said, “No”.
It is no secret how the current Bush administration feels about and how quickly they will threaten to cut off funding for progressive projects that stray from their own ideology. It’s also well known how damaging this has become in “developing countries” , killing millions of women a year by limiting their resources. But now the policy has gone beyond just denying women’s health to complete censorship of the issue at home. POPLINE is a US-based organization, and therefore exempt from the Global Gag Rule. Even if USAID did not force POPLINE to ban search results, the project very clearly felt it necessary to protect itself by denying access of scientific and medical information to the issue because of the attention it received. It is not only inexcusable but a chilling reminder of how wide this “ineffective federal policy” reaches, both abroad and within our own country.