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"Smashmortion" and the Slippery Slope
If you saw the movie "Knocked Up", you might recall that instead of actually mentioning one of the three options a woman has when faced with an unintended pregnancy, a character in the film refers to the verboten word as "smashmortion". Now we have life imitating art, as reported in this article from the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals Blog:
Call it censored, call it buried, call it lost—the search term “abortion” was all of the above for approximately a month on POPLINE—a publicly-funded database that its administrators describe as “Your connection to the world’s reproductive health literature.”
The incident simply points to a larger problem: Federal policy regarding comprehensive reproductive health care is inadequate.
Last week, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, uncovered this ironic situation while trying to “connect” to “reproductive health literature.” Health care providers, researchers, and advocates around the country were alarmed to learn that POPLINE (POPulation information onLINE), had rendered the search term “abortion” a stopword—which directs the database to ignore the term when used in a search. UCSF librarians discovered this deliberate restriction when they were unable to find a single document containing the word “abortion” in POPLINE’s database, and contacted the administrators at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to ask them why. Simply put, the UCSF librarians were told that “abortion” was eliminated as a search term by the POPLINE administrators so that the latter could examine the database for information “that might not have been consistent” with guidelines from a government agency that funds the project. And our UCSF colleagues were then given some mystifying, convoluted search term suggestions for finding medical literature on the subject, including “fertility control, post-conception” and “pregnancy, unwanted.”
By Friday morning, news of the self-censorship had spread like a virus...
Read the rest of the article here. I guarantee you'll be shocked at this most astonishing but quite common example of self-censorship because of Bush administration policies. Or if you just want a picture worth a thousand words, here's what people searching for information--any kind of information--about abortion on the government reproductive health database found: nothing except this message!
