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While stereotypically thought of as quiet and mousy, librarians (the 1980 Census showed that 85% of librarians were women) may be the biggest fighters for intellectual freedom in the US today. Since the Bush administration took office in 2001 and launched various campaigns to censor scientific information, as well as spy on the activities of Americans, librarians have been at the forefront of the fight for freedom of speech, privacy, and access to information. Whether librarians protest Patriot Act or censorship of the word abortion from public health databases, thank goodness we have these defenders of civil liberties on the front lines.
As first reported by Sarah Lai Stirland, one of the bloggers for the Wired Blog Network, Popline, a "U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world's largest database on reproductive health" suddenly and without notice or explanation to users, blocked searches on the word "abortion." The result was about 25,000 search results were concealed from those seeking scientific research and articles mentioning the procedure.
Gloria Won, a librarian at the University of California-San Francisco medical library, discovered the anomaly on March 31 and sent an email to Popline's database manager, Debbie Dickson, requesting more information about the discrepancy, noting that she had run a similar search in January with no problems. Popline's response was disturbing. "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." She suggested conducting searches with other terms that may be synonymous with abortion, such as "unwanted pregnancy" or "fertility control, postconception." Right.
Won and her colleague, Gail L. Sorrough, were outraged by the censorship. They contacted other librarians using a listserv, and furious librarians around the nation demanded that Johns Hopkins restore the search term. As Sorrough the director of medical library services told The New York Times, "it was absurd to restrict searches using “a perfectly good noun such as ‘abortion.’ ” Other librarians agreed, and by Friday, Stirland reported that dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health ordered the search term restored, stating that Popline's administrators overreacted to a complaint from USAID about two specific articles.
What does USAID have to do with the word abortion? Laura K explains at the award-winning we move to canada:
As outrageous and Orwellian as that seems, the US has been making "all abortion terms stop words" in the global sense for a long time, using what's called the Global Gag Rule. Officially known as The Mexico City Policy, the Gag Rule was instituted by (who else?) Ronald Reagan in 1984, rescinded by Bill Clinton in 1993, then reinstated by the Resident on his first day in office in 2001.
The Global Gag Rule states that no US funds can be provided to any foreign organization that uses funding from any other source to: perform abortions in cases other than a threat to the woman's life, rape or incest; provide counseling and referral for abortion; or lobby to make abortion legal or more available in their country.
Think about it. This is not just "we won't fund abortions". It's "we won't fund you at all, for anything, if you utter the word abortion or accept money from anyone else who does".
The Global Gag Rule increases the spread of HIV/AIDS, contributes to illegal and unsafe abortions, increases the world's population of unwanted babies, decreases the use of contraceptives (including HIV-preventing condoms), and in general increases human misery, suffering and death throughout the world.
For more information on how the Global Gag Rule hurts women, children and families, seeAccess Denied. You can search by continent and country to see the mighty reach of Empire.
At ACRLog ("blogging by and for academic librarians"), Barbara Fisher wrote:
I waited a bit before posting this, thinking it had to be a … I don’t know, a late and not very funny April Fool’s joke. But the joke’s on us... someone decided that the easiest way to “protect” related records was to eliminate the easiest way to find them (presumably the way mischievous policy wonks would use), suggesting secret-handshake search terms instead. The cat got out the bag and embarrassed the host organization, which responded very quickly.
The good news is that it has been restored, and was restored very soon after it hit the blogs.
While it is excellent that the overall
