Access to Abortion Search to be Restored in POPLINE; Johns Hopkins Releases Statement
Posted by Rachel on April 4, 2008
Following Wednesday’s revelation that the USAID-funded POPLINE reproductive health database had deliberately blocked users from performing a simple search on “abortion” because, “As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now,” medical librarians, feminists, public health professionals and others responded with outraged blog posts and calls and letters to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where the database is managed.
Today, Michael J. Klag, MD, MPH (Dean of the School at Hopkins) has released a statement detailing the events and indicating that the ability to search the database for “abortion” will be restored.
Dr. Klag notes:
I was informed this morning that the word “abortion” was blocked as a search term in the POPLINE family planning database administered by the Bloomberg School’s Center for Communication Programs. POPLINE provides evidence-based information on reproductive health and family planning and is the world’s largest database on these issues.
USAID, which funds POPLINE, found two items in the database related to abortion that did not fit POPLINE criteria. The agency then made an inquiry to POPLINE administrators. Following this inquiry, the POPLINE administrators at the Center for Communication Programs made the decision to restrict abortion as a search term.
I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have ordered 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.
Thank you to everyone who worked to call attention to this issue.
Cross-posted at Our Bodies Our Blog
Wired has some additional follow-up, as does the New York Times.
April 4, 2008 at 1:35 pm
I’ll be interested to know what those items were…
April 4, 2008 at 1:57 pm
*large sigh of relief*
April 4, 2008 at 2:00 pm
[...] Access restored. Filed under: Intellectual Freedom, Librarians’ Resources, Public Sphere by — Rory Litwin @ [...]
April 4, 2008 at 2:03 pm
[...] manages Popline) has ordered the decision reversed. See statement from Johns Hopkins (link from women’s health news); see also crooks & liars [...]
April 4, 2008 at 2:03 pm
[...] Harkavy picked up the story, the Dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins issued a statement promising to restore access to abortion searches in [...]
April 4, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Thank you, Dean Klag, for recognizing that one simple word deleted can mean an intellectual freedom blockade of very helpful materials on reproductive health. Developing country project reports, interventions, statistics, and grey literature on the subject of abortion is extremely difficult to obtain, except through POPLINE. I’m sure you are aware of the devastating censorship that occurred in Dhaka regarding this issue — ask Dr. David Sack.
As a funder (taxpayer) of the our US Government agency, USAID, I definitely want my tax dollars to be spent on equal and fair access to information, despite the political climate! Hopkins has earned deserved respect in your brave response. However, you may be jeopardizing more that ICDDR,B had to give up in Hopkins-based USAID project funding ($4 million lost from ICDDR,B I believe), but basic 1st Amendment Rights still available in the USA may protect your school and it’s life-saving projects. We were helpless in Bangladesh to fight USAID up front and were “rescued” by other government funders from Britain, Netherlands and Sweden who were aghast at the Bush government Mexico City and Trafficing certifications (gag rules for research & service).
Thanks again - talk to David before he goes off to Dhaka on the 15th April,svp
April 4, 2008 at 2:54 pm
[...] Access to Abortion Search to be Restored in POPLINE; Johns Hopkins Releases Statement [...]
April 4, 2008 at 2:57 pm
One thing we noticed is likely a dbase hiccup is the following.
1) A search for abortion returns 1894 results.
2) However, a subject search entered, =”abortion” returns nearly 25,000 hits.
The same is true for a keyword search =”abortion”.
Perhaps they are rebuilding the entire dbase or the problematic Popline search engine is causing issues.
ory
a basic keyword search, simply the word abortion is only searching specific fields.
April 4, 2008 at 3:06 pm
[...] on abortion/POPLINE April 4, 2008 Filed under: Uncategorized — jj @ 8:06 pm From Women’s Health News, April [...]
April 4, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Gary, I think they must still be working on it - every time I re-run the search, I get more results.
April 4, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Good eye Rachel. It’s up to 4500 now.
April 4, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Wired has a bit more info:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/administrators.html
April 4, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Thanks, Erika, for pointing me to that - I’ve now added it to the post.
April 4, 2008 at 6:09 pm
[...] Comments on Rachel Walden’s blog are tracking the return of [...]
April 5, 2008 at 8:50 am
[...] problem is not just the censorship of programming abortion as a stop word, which has been restored, the programmers of POPLIne also removed articles. And we are not given a sufficient reason. What [...]
April 5, 2008 at 10:08 am
thanks rachel and all the librarians who jumped on this one.
the story is on page 10 of New York Times hardcopy today, 4/10/08. should be on front page instead of “Clintons Made $109 Million…” we knew that. it’s the fast-moving erosion of freedom of information we need to wake up with every morning.
April 5, 2008 at 10:17 am
correction: in last comment, “today” is Saturday, April 5.
April 5, 2008 at 2:18 pm
[...] Blog post from Women’s Health Matters including statement by Johns Hopkins Dean. [...]
April 5, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Thanks, Naomi, I’ll add a link to it to the post. [As a totally off-topic aside, I just sent the Oberlin alumni mag a note last night that they really should profile Barbara.]
April 5, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Maybe we should get all the librarians to start emailing that NYTimes story around so that it ends up on the “top mailed” list and gets more attention!
April 5, 2008 at 9:53 pm
[...] Search engines, by their nature, are agnostic to the content that they’re searching. They’re merely tools to help find information, and they take no position on the information they find. That’s why we’ve always found it troubling when, say, the recording industry sues a music search engine for helping people find music (infringing or not). And the same argument stands in a new situation on an even more controversial subject. A health search engine, run by Johns Hopkins University, has felt that it needed to purposely show zero results for the search term “abortion” in order to keep receiving federal funding. At issue is a federal law that denies federal funds to any organizations that “actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.” So the team at Hopkins feared that having any results on the search term “abortion” might disqualify them from receiving funding. No matter what your opinion on the topic of abortion may be (and please, don’t turn the comments into an argument on that), a search engine is just a tool, and it’s rather ridiculous for it to completely ban one search term. Update: The decision has apparently been reversed. [...]
April 7, 2008 at 1:38 pm
[...] do governo dos EUA. Mas antes de publicarmos a notícia, ficamos sabendo via Boing Boing, citando o Women’s Health News, que eles voltaram [...]
April 15, 2008 at 7:52 pm
[...] They’ve turned around: I was informed this morning that the word ???abortion??? was blocked as a search term in the [...]