Someday We'll Look Back On This and It Will All Seem Funny

Uh, no. Actually, it won't.

NYT: Health Database Was Set Up to Ignore ‘Abortion’

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...

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.

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.

And once again, librarians are on the front lines of fighting Republican wingnut bullshit:

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.’ ”...

“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.”

Questions: (1) Why was the dean of the school in the dark about this decision? (2) What is Debra L. Dickson's background? (3) Was this a unilateral decision by Ms. Dickson? If not, who else participated in/influenced the decision? (4) In addition to seeding the the federal government, have wingnuts seeded little poison pills throughout America's universities as well?

Sweet Jesus, January 20, 2009 cannot come too soon.