Government-funded health database blocked ‘abortion’ records

The world’s largest database on reproductive health, Popline, a search engine run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, blocked any searches for the term “abortion” in response to pressure from Bush administration officials.

“We recently made all abortion terms stop words,” database manager Debbie Dickson wrote in an e-mail to Gloria Won, the UCSF medical center librarian who noticed the search term was blocked. “As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.”

Pressure from inside the administration of President Bush appears to be responsible for the blocking. “We are part of the Bush administration, so we have to make sure that all parts of the story are told,” Sandra Jordan, director of communications in USAID’s office of population and reproductive health, told Sarah Lai Stirland of Wired. “The administration’s policy is definitely anti-abortion, and the administration does not see abortion as a part of family planning policy.”

Johns Hopkins officials said they weren’t aware of the blocked search term and were working to rectify the situation.