Abortion? Does not compute!
April 04, 2008 11:54:00
by Karina
Web Editor
Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Action Fund
What happens when you type the word "abortion" into the "world's largest database on reproductive health?
Absolutely nothing.
That's right, this database run by John Hopkins University, and funded by the U.S. government, has blocked searches using the search term "abortion."
Via wired:
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."
This is a medical database for scientific research. Blocking abortion as a search term doesn't mean that suddenly abortion doesn't exist. Melissa Just, library director at the cancer research institute followed the incident on a listserve and was troubled by the censorship:
"Even if you were trying to make an argument to someone that abortion is a bad idea for them—whether it's a health risk, or you're concerned about their mental well being, you wouldn't be able to find articles about your claim," she notes. "It's shutting off both the pro and the con access."
Exactly. Access is the keyword there. But isn't it always?
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