1984 - More Bush Censorship

Crooks and Liars has the whole story

A medical librarian, who ran a typical search on POPLINE, (the world’s largest database on reproductive health) found something very disturbing. The term “abortion” had been pretty much blocked from its database for normal searches . Go here and try the search. I did and got “No records found by latest query.”

What is POPLINE?

the world’s largest database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues. POPLINE is maintained by the INFO Project at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs and is funded by the United States Agency for International Development. (USAID).

I was contacted yesterday by someone and given this email thread. Here’s what he/she said in the email:

The e-mail exchange below is fairly straight-forward: a governmental database on Population, POPLINE (POPulation OnLINE) has been changed so that one can no longer search the term “abortion.” As the representative from POPLINE states, “As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.”

I suspect pressure was placed from on high to do this. Why would the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, where POPLINE is hosted, decide on its own to eliminate searching for information on abortion? I hope you can publicize this outrageous maneuver.

Here’s the email conversation that was posted here. It’s quite troubling. Names were edited for confidentiality!

Boy we are different from those repressive third world regimes how?