Thursday, April 10, 2008

Abortion Ban

POPLINE, a federally-funded data base at Johns Hopkins University, recently banned abortion as a search term. POPLINE is the world’s largest database on reproductive health, providing access to over 360,000 records and articles on family planning, fertility and sexually transmitted diseases. Although the ban has been lifted, questions remain over the process that led to the term’s exclusion. 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).

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2 comments:

National Council for Research on Women said...
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National Council for Research on Women said...

On April 4, apparently in response to bloggers, Michael J. Klag, dean of the Bloomberg School, reversed the decision to remove "abortion" as a search term and said he would launch an inquiry into the change. In a statement published on the school's Web site, Klag said that USAID had found two items in the database that did not meet POPLINE's criteria for "evidence-based information" and administrators decided to remove the search term.

From Women's eNews, for more http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3555