Bush Administration's Anti-Abortion Stance Almost Trumps Scientific Inquiry

We were appalled to discover this story yesterday. Bush resurrected a Reagan administration policy that prevented USAID from funding any projects that offered abortions or encouraged abortion as a form of birth control. This has been termed by opponents as "The Global Gag Rule" and there have been several attempts to reverse the decision by both houses of Congress.

From the Ala's Office for Intellectual Freedom:

Controversy arose this week when librarians discovered that they could no longer use the word 'abortion' on POPLINE, a reproductive health database maintained by the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

When informed about the restriction, Dr. Michael J. Klag, the Dean of the Bloomberg School, reversed the decision and restored full access to the POPLINE database.

Loriene Roy, President of the American Library Association, issued the following statement on the controversy:

"We applaud Dr. Klag's swift action to restore full access to the POPLINE database. We are dismayed, however, at the circumstances that caused the administrators running the POPLINE database to begin blocking any and all searches on the word "abortion." Any federal policy or rule that requires or encourages information providers to block access to scientific information because of partisan or religious bias is censorship. Such policies promote ideology over science and only serve to deny researchers, students, and individuals on both sides of the issue access to accurate scientific information."

While critics had decried this policy for years as damaging both to efforts to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and to slow the growth of world population, this latest incident is the most Orwellian yet. In this case, it was not an order that came down from the executive branch- but rather the over-eagerness of a mid-level employee to ensure compliance with the policy (not law).