Harder to find abortion

At least in a data search.

Administrators at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health blocked the word “abortion” as a search term in a public health database after the office of a U.S. agency complained about two abortion-related articles in the database, Wired.com reports.

Astute and responsible action by those administrators. Those two items “had to do with abortion advocacy”, said a spokesman for the school.

The PopLine search site is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a federal office in charge of providing foreign aid, including health care funding, to developing nations.

Bush administration policy denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform abortions or “actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.”

This is a good reminder of the importance of the vote.

And an illustration of how saturated cyberspace is with abortion advocacy.

A search on “abortion” produced nearly 25,000 results from the database, but a search on Thursday resulted in the message “No records found by latest query.”

It’s a start.

This reminds me of a good Off the Record piece on CWNews a couple of years ago called ‘Algorithms for choice’, or something close. It was about how search engines turn up a list of possible other links as suggestions for what the searcher might be looking for when they type in a word. When you typed in ‘abortion’, it gave some sites and asked if you might also be looking for…..a bunch of other links for crisis pregnancy centers and related sites. Abortion activists were outraged, and tried to force the search engine to remove those links to any possible site that might…prevent abortion.

Looks like at Johns Hopkins, the algorithms are for life, so to speak.