A publicly financed database at Johns Hopkins University — the largest reproductive health database in the world — censored the word “abortion” from its searches. Why? To avoid having their funding pulled in the current anti-choice, pro-censorship climate. RH Reality Check was on top of this one from the beginning, so check out their coverage; their outcry was key in getting the search restored. Our Bodies Our Blog has more.
The censorship blocked more than 25,000 searches. And this is one more example of how the Global Gag Rule not only impedes health care access and threatens women’s lives, but violates are very basic values of education, access to information and free speech:
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 librarian at the University of California at San Francisco noticed the new censorship on Monday, while carrying out a routine research request on behalf of academics and researchers at the university. The search term had functioned properly as of January.
Puzzled, she contacted the manager of the database, Johns Hopkins’ Debbie Dickson, who replied in an April 1st e-mail that the university had recently begun blocking the search term because the database received federal funding.
“We recently made all abortion terms stop words,” Dickson wrote in a note to Gloria Won, the UCSF medical center librarian making the inquiry. “As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.”
After outcry from activists, the word “abortion” has been restored as a search term. There are a lot of morals to this story — the degree to which anti-choicers are willing to go to push their ideological agenda; the invisibility of women’s health concerns; the topsy-turvy world we’re living in when reproductive health funding is contingent on pretending abortion doesn’t exist — but I think my favorite lesson is the one we should have all learned in primary school: Don’t piss off the librarian.
That’s what I’M saying, Jill. Definitely do not piss off the librarian. Those women are fierce and know their stuff. Thanks most of all to Rachel at Women’s Health News who brought this to my attention originally! Thanks for posting on this.
The degree to which we’ve dropped the ball — or been unable to keep up with, to mix my metaphors hopelessly — and allowed the pro-lifers to make inroads like this is incredibly frustrating. Hurrah for librarians, so often the last line of defense against sheer stupidity.
Thanks, Amie (and Jill) – we librarians do get a little riled up about this sort of thing, and I really appreciate everybody who helped bring it to the attention of those outside of the medical librarian community.
I work at a health research organization, so I was amused to see emails about this flying back and forth and then see it on the feminist blogosphere.
Ah, at least they’ve reversed it. But seriously, how can you say you give reproductive health information with no reference to abortion? Anybody who seeks to silence this issue isn’t thinking aobut helping women at all, for all their talk about how abortion hurts women. Lakc of education and choice hurt far many, far more.
Meanwhile here in the UK, we’ve got precious little pro-life groups suing Google for refusing to advertise their anti-abortion propaganda whenever somebody searches for abortion. Apparently, Google’s policy is to not display religious arguments against abortion, only non-religious ones. The group claims discrimination on the grounds that google displays adverts for porn and instruments of torture (don’t they know BDSM is legal?), which I bet are, you know, displayed if you actually search for porn, not something unrelated.
Personally, if I want a Christian fundamentalist anti-aboriton site, that’s precisely what I’d type in. I have little desire for my searches to return unrelated (or opposing) links to what I am looking for. Kind of like if I type the word ‘feminism’, I don’t want all my top results and ads to be MRA sites.
I heard about this through my sister who saw it mentioned on a topical morning show. Even more worrying, one of their panel seemed to think that they should have been allowed, to show the other side of the argument. As if there isn’t plenty out there for people to find if they want it! Seriously, people have got to get over the ”free speech = you gotta publish my shit and like it” mentality, because nobody owes it to anybody else to give them a forum for their beliefs.
Sorry if it’s tangential, but I think this example of crazy anti-choice power games makes it worryingly relevant.
[...] But the implications are chilling. We’re dealing with a serious censorship issue — if libraries are afraid to present interested parties with factual information on a topic because it might upset some puritan folks, we’re in a very bad place. We don’t want a precedent being set and emboldening other anti-choicers across the country to take similarly ridiculous courses of action. Censorship is an active goal of the anti-choice movement, one that has been relatively successful I might add, and this is a clear expansion of that tactic. It’s not just what doctors can say to their patients anymore, or whether or not teachers are allowed to factually answer questions in sex ed classes, they’re going after the libraries — generally the biggest, most reliable and accessible public information resource. Um, again. [...]