UNITED STATES: GOVERNMENT :
DATABASES :
DEMOGRAPHY: ISSUES :
MEDICAL: ABORTION :
CENSORSHIP:
A Couple of New Articles Regarding POPLINE Censorship of Abortion
as a Subject Heading: Some Implications to Consider
Health & Science
Magazine Led to Database's 'Abortion' Search Block
by Brenda Wilson
NPR
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89486048>
Morning Edition, April 9, 2008 An inquiry into why the world's largest
database on reproductive health blocked searches using the term "abortion"
has found the restriction was put in place because of articles from an
abortion advocacy magazine available on the site.
The block was an "overreaction," says Michael Klag, the dean of Johns
Hopkins School of Public Health, which maintains the POPLINE database.
When Klag learned that the search function for abortion had been removed,
he ordered it restored. The block was taken down Friday afternoon.
Klag says the seven articles that triggered the restriction in late
February were from an issue of A, the Abortion Magazine, which is
published by Ipas, an international reproductive rights organization.
Ipas' executive director, Anu Kumar, says she knew about the block but
didn't know it had anything to do with Ipas.
"We are disappointed," Kumar says. "We know that 40 million abortions take
place every year and nearly 20 million of them are unsafe. Women are
literally dying while we're dithering about these words."
-----------------------------------------
Abortion hits roadblock on information highway
Apr 09, 2008 04:30 AM
Antonia Zerbisias
<http://www.thestar.com/article/411442>
If you think that some of the Bush administration's conservative politics
and Orwellian moves in the U.S. can't affect Canada, then you have some
research to do.
Ten days ago at the University of California in San Francisco, librarian
Gloria Won was running through POPLINE (POPulation information onLINE),
billed as "the world's largest database on reproductive health."
Maintained by Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, and freely available
to medical schools, health organizations and the public, it is funded by
the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Won was stymied. Entering the keyword "abortion," she kept getting the
message "No records found." Odd, because she had done a similar search in
January and found thousands of scholarly and peer-reviewed articles on the
subject. When she emailed POPLINE, database manager Debra Dickson replied:
"We recently made all abortion terms stop words."
<snip>
The record is stunning.
So far, the Bush administration has closed Environmental Protection Agency
libraries. It has also dismantled PubSCIENCE, another publicly available
scholarly database, because it competed with private sector services. And
it severely weakened ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center), a
storehouse of studies on education.
<snip>
Such is Bush's America where you have to watch what you say and where
women have to watch what they do.
And so, rather than risk losing its funding, an organization dedicated to
health research and medical information would send "abortion" down the
memory hole.
But there's more than a word at stake here it's an indicator of how, both
in Canada and the U.S., women's reproductive choices, are also threatened
with erasure.
Antonia Zerbisias is a Living section columnist. azerbisias@thestar.ca.
She blogs at thestar.blogs.com.
-----------------------------------------
The complete articles may be read at the URLs provided for each.
Some background from a prior Net-Gold post:
DATABASES : MEDICAL: ABORTION :
UNITED STATES: GOVERNMENT :
CENSORSHIP:
Abortion Returns to POPLINE and Media Coverage of the
Events in the POPLINE Aborting of Searching Abortion
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Net-Gold/message/23016>
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Temple University
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