In a remarkable victory for common sense a US government funded health website is allowing users to search for articles about ‘abortion’.

Wired last week revealed that Popline had “quietly begun to block searches on the word ‘abortion,’ concealing nearly 25,000 search results”. The website claims to be “the world’s largest database on reproductive health” and is run by Johns Hopkins university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Last week it appeared to be backtracking rapidly, as late on Friday consecutive searches by one of my colleagues revealed a steadily climbing number of hits for a search on ‘abortion’. It’s now up to over 26,000, still some way below PubMed’s 64,000.

Michael Klag, dean of the Bloomberg School, gave this explanation (statement):

USAID, which funds POPLINE, found two items in the database related to abortion that did not fit POPLINE criteria. The agency then made an inquiry to POPLINE administrators. Following this inquiry, the POPLINE administrators at the Center for Communication Programs made the decision to restrict abortion as a search term.

I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have directed that the POPLINE administrators restore “abortion” as a search term immediately. I will also launch an inquiry to determine why this change occurred.

Image: screen grab of Popline