Reproductive health?

I missed this story last month, and it seems to have been resolved for now, but what these people been smokin'? The POPLINE database "provides evidence-based information on reproductive health and family planning".

"Controversy arose this week when librarians discovered that they could no longer use the word 'abortion' on POPLINE, a reproductive health database maintained by the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)."

Confused librarians quickly emailed the POPLINE admins. (Note for the non-librarians: a "stop word" is a word that the database ignores when it appears in a search query--usually things like “a”, “an”, and “the”.)

"Yes we did make a change in POPLINE. We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now. In addition to the terms you’re already using, you could try using ‘Fertility Control, Postconception’. This is the broader term to our ‘Abortion’ terms and most records have both in the keyword fields. Also, adding ‘unwanted w2 pregnancy’ in place
of aborti*. We have a keyword Pregnancy, Unwanted and there are 2517 records with aborti* & unwanted w2 pregnancy."

Bwa?

And also, I might add, ‘Fertility Control, Postconception’. For realz?

After a librarian-led kerfluzzle, the Dean restored access and explained the matter thusly:

"It is our understanding that USAID, the federal agency that funds POPLINE, is restricted by law from funding any abortion activities or supplies. In February, a search by USAID officials found two items in the POPLINE database that advocated for abortion. Because they were advocacy materials, they did not meet the criteria for inclusion in the database. The agency informed POPLINE administrators who removed them from POPLINE. POPLINE administrators also found and removed from the database five other items from the same issue of the same magazine, for the same reason: They were advocacy materials and did not meet the criteria for inclusion in the database. POPLINE administrators took the additional step of temporarily restricting "abortion" as a search term while the database was examined for other information that might not have been consistent with USAID guidelines."

(Note the creepy fact that the guv'ment has agents who scan publicly accessible information for ideologically questionable materials. The volume of information is such that this must be very expensive, involving many staff, full time. It can't be just an automated scanning program, since it takes human judgment on what constitutes "advocacy".)

The key issue seems to be the Siljander Amendment to the annual Appropriations Act, which is paraphrased by USAID as:

"No foreign assistance funds may be used to lobby for or against abortion."

The list of offending articles, all from "Abortion Magazine":

• How can the human-rights system work for women?


• The importance of teaching human rights.


• Human rights in Latin America: From discourse to reality.


• An interview with Monica Roa.


• Abortion is a human-rights issue.

Sigh.