Hypocrisy On Abortion

The MCPS citizens advisory committee had a strange moment a couple of years ago when we were discussing the new sex-ed curriculum. There was a point where the question came up, shouldn't the curriculum talk at some point about what to do if you find you're pregnant? It seemed like the elephant in the room to me, such an obvious thing.

The answer is, you can do one of three things. You can have the baby and keep it, you can have the baby and put it up for adoption, or you can have an abortion.

Even as the words came out of our mouths we knew it would never happen. Even though all those choices are legal and are selected every day by responsible people, we knew the school district would never allow the word "abortion" to be used in a health class in a non-negative way. To me it's so discouraging to see the hypocrisy we have insitutionalized, that we let our society be held hostage by a small gang of pseudomoral thugs.

Look what happened online:

WASHINGTON — Johns Hopkins University said Friday that it had programmed its computers to ignore the word “abortion” in searches of a large, publicly financed database of information on reproductive health after federal officials raised questions about two articles in the database. The dean of the Public Health School lifted the restrictions after learning of them.

A spokesman for the school, Timothy M. Parsons, said the restrictions were enforced starting in February.

Johns Hopkins manages the population database known as Popline with money from the Agency for International Development.

Popline is the world’s largest database on reproductive health, with more than 360,000 records and articles on family planning, fertility and sexually transmitted diseases. Health Database Was Set Up to Ignore ‘Abortion’

Wow, I never used this before, but it's great: PopLine.

You could find information on any other medical procedure, disease, whatever, having to do with reproduction, but they just took that one word out as a search term.

This article is careful not to say that the government ordered them to remove that search term, but the idea is not exactly squashed, either.

Mr. Parsons said the development agency had expressed concern after finding “two articles about abortion advocacy” in the database. The articles, he said, did not fit database criteria and were removed.

Employees who manage the database instructed their computers to ignore the word “abortion” as a search term.

After learning of the restrictions on Friday, the dean, Dr. Michael J. Klag, said: “I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have directed that the Popline administrators restore ‘abortion’ as a search term immediately. I will also launch an inquiry to determine why this change occurred.”

He knows of course that he is risking losing an important grant. It is in the university's interest to stay on good terms with the people who hand out the money for projects like this. It doesn't need to be Johns Hopkins, I'll bet you there are other universities with the competence to manage a medical database.

Dr. Klag said the school was “dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge, and not its restriction.”

Ted Miller, a spokesman for Naral Pro-Choice America, an abortion rights group, said: “The public has a right to know why someone would censor relevant medical information. The Bush administration has politicized science as part of an ideological agenda. So it’s important to know if that occurred here.”

True, that. Did government people request this change? Who would be surprised if they did?

Librarians at the Medical Center of the University of California, San Francisco, expressed concern about the restrictions this week after they had difficulty retrieving articles from Popline.

In an e-mail response on Tuesday, Johns Hopkins told the librarians that “abortion” was no longer a valid search term.

“We recently made all abortion terms stop words,” Debra L. Dickson, a Popline manager, wrote. “As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.”

Ms. Dickson suggested that instead of using “abortion,” librarians could use other terms like “fertility control, postconception” or “pregnancy, unwanted.”

Gail L. Sorrough, director of medical library services at the medical center in San Francisco, said it was absurd to restrict searches using “a perfectly good noun such as ‘abortion.’ ”

Under the rule, Popline ignored the word “abortion,” just as it ignores terms like “a” and “the.” Ms. Sorrough and a colleague, Gloria Won, reported their experience on an electronic mailing list, and librarians protested the restrictions.

Interestingly, librarians have been some of the biggest supporters of the Internet since it started. I remember even back in the days before we had a graphical interface to hyperlinked content, that is, web browsers, the librarians had big servers with all kinds of categorized information. It's also interesting that the medical community has been so slow at adopting this kind of technology. And then you see this sloppy obeisance to the hint of authority and the almighty dollar and it starts to make sense.

“We sent this out on a listserv, and it just exploded,” Ms. Sorrough said. “Eliminating this term essentially blocks access to reports in the database and ultimately to information about abortion. Unwanted pregnancy is not a synonym for abortion.”

Items on Popline include articles on “demand for abortion by unmarried teenagers” and federal judges’ abortion rulings.

A pregnant woman does have the three choices I gave above, and any of the choices may make the most sense given the situation. Some people may not approve of some of the options, but it turns out those same people sometimes find themselves in a situation where it's the only thing they can realistically do. Yes, evangelical women get abortions, too, and Catholic women. It would make sense to learn what you can about the procedure to inform your decision about having it done. It is irresponsible to have that information in a format that can make it easily available to the public, and then hide it.