Editorial: Censorship Alert at Hopkins

A stealth attack on U.S. freedoms—intellectual, academic, and personal—came to a halt in early April, at least for the time being, when quick action by librarians restored the term abortion to the search function of a health database. Word spread like wildfire as the story migrated from the library blogosphere to the mainstream press, landing in quick succession on Wired, NPR, the New York Times, and a host of other outlets. The censorship came to light after Gloria Won, a librarian at a University of California–San Francisco (UCSF) medical center library, reported to her director that she was getting few results for a search on abortion on POPLINE, the world's largest database on reproductive health.

The database is supported and maintained at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and is publicly funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). So Won contacted the project's database manager, Debra Dickson, only to be told, “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.'”

For those of us not in the know, a stop word is a word like “an” or “the,” which library searches routinely ignore. The move thus effectively blocked all searches on the term abortion, at least for most general users of the database. (Savvy librarians were able to use other standard search strategies to get results, and one blogger even pointed out that Google retrieved articles quite nicely.)

Once Won and her boss, Gail Sorrough, director of medical library services at UCSF medical center at Mount Zion, spread the word on medical librarian electronic lists, “It just spiraled,” Sorrough told NPR.

The result: instant response as soon as Michael Klag, Bloomberg's dean, was made aware of the block. “I could not disagree more strongly with this decision,” he said in a statement on April 4, “and I have directed that the POPLINE administrators restore 'abortion' as a search term immediately.”

Apparently, according to Dean Klag in an update April 8, POPLINE staff had been contacted in February by USAID officials, who pointed out two abortion advocacy articles. Under the Bush (and Reagan) administration, USAID guidelines are anti-abortion, and, said Klag, USAID has refused funds “for abortion activities or supplies.” The POPLINE folks took it upon themselves, however, without even being asked to by USAID officials, to delete seven articles from the database and pull abortion as a search term. The articles were all from the Winter 2008 issue of A: The Abortion Magazine. (Klag's statement cites the title as Abortion Magazine.) The block on the term abortion purportedly was put in place “while the database was examined for other information that might not have been consistent with USAID guidelines.”

What is most disturbing about this incident is the self-censorship. Fear of reprisal was enough to spur the POPLINE administrators to act. While Tim Parsons, a Hopkins media liaison, told LJ that “no other material had been removed,” he said he couldn't “speak to the future of what USAID or POPLINE will do.” Klag said that his school “will work with our staff to reinforce their appreciation of the importance of academic integrity and of the central role of universities...in the dissemination of information.” That may not be enough, however, as Loriene Roy, president of the American Library Association, noted. Any way you look at it, the USAID policy “is censorship,” she said, because it “requires or encourages information providers to block access to scientific information because of partisan or religious bias.”

You have to love librarians, though, when it comes to censorship issues. In a matter of days, they created an uproar, brought POPLINE, USAID, and Johns Hopkins under scrutiny, and got an act of censorship reversed. Librarians have come to the rescue before, and they'll have to do it again, especially until this administration and its abhorrent politics are long gone. It's not about abortion, it's about freedom.