The world’s largest database for reproductive health, which is funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), last week made it impossible to search its contents for the word “abortion.” But the volume of complaints when it came to light forced it to reverse the decision.
The explanation given for the ban by the administrator of the website, which is called Popline (population information online) was that because the project was funded by federal money it was thought “best for now.”
Under the US president, George Bush, USAID has been banned from giving funds to any foreign organisation that performs, refers, or counsels on abortion, regardless of whether abortion is legal in their country.
Critics were quick to assume that the decision to ban the word “abortion” as a search term was political.
The change first came to light when the research librarian Gloria Won, of the University of California in San Francisco, noticed that a multiword search including “abortion” returned fewer citations than the same search a few months earlier. On 1 April she wrote an email to seek an explanation.
The administrator Debbie Dickson replied, “We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.”
A stop word is one that the search program ignores; the most common are “a,” “an,” “the,” and “is.” Although all the documents that contain the word abortion remained in the database, they effectively became invisible if only that word was used in a search.
Ms Dickson suggested using other key words to get around the restriction. Ms Won replied, “Eliminating this term essentially blocks access to the reports in the database and ultimately to information about abortion. ‘Unwanted . . . pregnancy’ is not a synonym for abortion.”
Ms Won posted their exchange on an electronic mailing list for medical librarians, and word rapidly spread among that community and others into the mainstream media. It prompted criticism of censorship directed at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, which maintains the database for UNAIDS.
Michael Klang, the school’s dean, learnt of the incident on the morning of 4 April and immediately responded. “I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have directed the Popline administrators to restore ‘abortion’ as a search term immediately . . . [The school] is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction,” he said in a news release.
The incident seems to have begun when USAID noted two entries on abortion among the 360 000 entries in the database that did not seem to meet evidentiary criteria for inclusion. It asked that they be removed, and they were.
The website administrators apparently took further action to make “abortion” a stop word on their own initiative. Dr Klang has launched an inquiry to determine why this occurred.
Some critics were quick to place the incident within a broader context of the social conservatism that the Bush administration has sought to impose on US policy.
“Too often in this political climate we see political ideology trumping science in the field of reproductive health. Removing ‘abortion’ as a search term on a publicly funded reproductive health care database is clearly a decision driven by ideology,” said Wayne Shields, president of the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals.
The Popline database is at http://db.jhuccp.org/ics-wpd/popweb.