Source: The Inquirer The site, Popline, which is administered by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland, recently got a grant from USAID, the Agency for International Development, which supposedly is provides foreign aid and health care funding to developing nations. This is the same federal agency which revokes that very funding from third world clinics if they educate women about birth control, and which tells Africans that abstinence is the solution to the deadly AIDS virus, not condoms. But obviously not content with preventing foreigners in the world’s poorest and most desperate countries from accessing information on abortion, they have now decided to censor the information from Americans too. After all, charity starts at home. Any search for the keyword “abortion” on the site now simply gives the dubious "No records found by latest query" result. Would this be a good time to mention that the USA often refers to itself as “leader of the FREE world”? The blatant censorship first came to light after a librarian at the University of California at San Francisco was in the midst of a research request on behalf of (knocked up?) academics and researchers at the university on Monday. Sure that it must be a mistake, as the search function on the site had worked properly at least until January, she called Debbie Dickson, the manager of the database at Johns Hopkins. Hopkins replied that the university had indeed started to censor the search term due to the fact that the database was receiving government funding. "As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now", she sputtered. The policy of denying government funding to NGOs who either actually perform abortions, or just happen to mention and explain about it is a policy that goes back to the Reagan era. President Bush saw fit to revive the outdated, ridiculously conservative policy in 2001 (just when he was preaching about bringing freedom and democracy to the Arab world). Sheepish and apologetic Dickson offered a few hints about how people could circumvent the censorship. She noted that using obscure search strategies and different words for “abortion” would probably get around the keyword blocking. For example, the keywords 'Fertility Control, Postconception', or "unwanted w/2 pregnancy", would probably do the trick. Basically, just as with real, live neo-conservative politicians, if you use big clever words, they probably won’t understand you.