From Wired.com:
The Popline database, which bills itself as "Your connection to the world's reproductive health literature," is blocking searches for the term abortion.
A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world's largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word "abortion," concealing nearly 25,000 search results.
Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It's funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the federal office in charge of providing foreign aid, including health care funding, to developing nations.
The massive database indexes a broad range of reproductive health literature, including titles like "Previous abortion and the risk of low birth weight and preterm births," and "Abortion in the United States: Incidence and access to services, 2005."
But on Thursday, a search on "abortion" was producing only the message "No records found by latest query."
Hasn't the anti-science stance of this administration done enough damage? Now they are actively trying to limit information on abortion by simply wiping it off the Popline search.
The people who pretended, and often enough still pretend that Global Climate Change isn't happening, the people who censored and altered government-produced scientific documents to lie about the science, then turned around and claimed that the U.S. is leading the world on Climate Change, are happy to pretend away another portion of the reality in which we live.
UPDATE:: We're all getting a variety of numbers of hits when we try it out. I got 104, and a couple of others reported 365 and 316 -- all a far cry from the 25k reportedly being blocked, which suggests that the people managing the database are reacting to this.
Keep in mind that the Popline managers verified this story:
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.
Another Update:
From AnnieJo:
Fortunately the block was not so complete as to strip out the term "abortion". Apparently if one did a truncated search for "abort*" in the subject field, one could still get the records. And then within a record, one could click on the term "abortion" and up would pop all 25,000 or so records.
Final Update:
Further coverage from Ms. Magazine.