This is sympotmatic of two trends in the US:

1) The idea that being a citizen is nothing more than being a consumer.

“It’s federally funded, therefore it should be agreeable to all taxpayers (read: customers).”

As if that’s ever a possibility.

Or, “I pay more taxes than you, thus I have more say than you, and I’m a Christian!”

and

2) The idea that your health decisions should be based on someone else’s religious convictions.

There is a place for the abortion debate. Medical databases should be off-limits.

I wonder if they are logging IP addresses of all people who DO search for “abortion” so they can get a nice map of which institutions to target for reeducation?

As for the idea of the internet as a medium for “true democracy,” the idea that there’s a true way is what allows censorship to thrive and these sort of situations to arise. And democracy hasn’t been looking all that promising for the past 8 years.

I have higher hopes for the internet.

*sigh*

So much work to be done. . .

This wreaks of it. I’m not anti-religion or anything like that; I’m not agnostic or atheist. I don’t go to church on a regular basis, but I have gone and will again. This isn’t an attack on religion.

Just an observation.

To all of you who are outraged – go volunteer for your friendly local abortion clinic. They need you now more than ever.

Okay, this is beyond my belief that JH would do this, so I’ve written their president and the chair of the dean of the school responsible for this research a nice civil letter and I’ll continue to post the responses.

If anyone else is interested in writing the
addresses are: POPLINE@jhuccp.org,
wrbrody@jhu.edu,
mklag@jhsph.edu.

Disgusting lack of scientific ethics at Johns Hopkins reported in the popular press

Dr. Brody, President of Johns Hopkins University,
Dr. Klag, Dean of Bloomberg school of Public Health,
and the POPLINE team,

This morning I read a post in Boing Boing (a popular web blog on a variety of topics) that suggested
that your esteemed university had participated in censoring scientific research. The link is http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/04/usfunded-health-sear.html#comments. Boing Boing is in the top
four thousand most popular website in the United States (according to Alexa).

The article maintains that the word abortion has been added to your federally funded search engine’s
list of stop words and that one of your researches felt that this was a requirement to take federal funding.

I have a number of questions that I would like to ask and will happily post your response on BoingBoing
to help clarify this problem.

Is this true?
I should hope that it violates your university’s ethics policy for you faculty to participate in the censorship of the scientific community.
Who is the principle investigator on this project?
Would you kindly add them to this correspondence?
Which office within Johns Hopkins handles your issues of Scientific Integrity and Ethics?
Is it likely that even if Johns Hopkins ethics policies have not been violated by this action that
the principle investigator has violated the ethical tenets of one or more medical societies?

As search engine professional (with companies such as Lycos, Amazon and Zillow) and a former
researcher at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, I can only express my dismay that,
if these charges are true, that your fine institution has sullied its name by bowing to political censorship
of science.

Sincerely, Brian G. Milnes

BobDobbs points out the NLM’s PubMed hasn’t been government-censored or self-censored, so I don’t think this act reflects US policy at all.

If you go about blaming the government for something they didn’t even do, you won’t put the pressure where it belongs: on the organization that is don’t something you don’t like.

For that matter, crying Orwell about this is showing the same degree of paranoia as JH. There’s a comment on Wired that sums it right up:

“What fucking assholes John Hopkins are. Government doesn’t need to censor when people are willing to censor themselves.”

…

Just to let everybody know: This thread is about a publicly funded search engine that has censored all references to a legal medical procedure.

It is not about abortion per se. If you try to make it an argument about abortion itself, your contents will settle during shipping.

I rang the JH President’s office and was directed around to their communications director, Dennis OShay. I pointed out that JH was about to receive a hopefully unwarranted black eye. He said that they’ve already received calls from the mainstream press and that the school of public health is working on this.

-B

See the War on Drugs, where even those who recognize that it hasn’t stemmed drug use defend the current policies because drugs are baaad, m’kay?

Except it’s the opposite for guns: You can’t outlaw them because criminals will just ignore the law.

Nope, still can’t tell.

That is a simply chilling, Orwellian statement.

Maybe the internet will become a medium for true democracy. We can but hope…

Under a Reagan-era policy revived by President Bush in 2001, USAID denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform abortions, or that “actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.”

Acknowledging the existence of scholarly research on a topic apparently constitutes active promotion of that topic.

http://db.jhuccp.org/ics-wpd/popweb/contact.html

Also, I just had to point out that Popline bills itself as “the world’s largest database on reproductive health” not “the world’s largest health-information search engine”. Popline contains about 360k citations, while Embase contains about 18m and PubMed 17m.

Whatever your view on the subject, it is an overriding interest that medical information is available to people. It would probably be unwise under present circumstances, however, to take this to the courts. The damage done by a bad precedent can take years to undo.