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Reprinted from Women’s eNews as an educational service under the fair use doctrine of the U. S. Copyright Law.   Subscribe here.

As an aside, personally I subjected myself to a tubal ligation so that I would never face the emotional and psychological consequences of possibly having to make this sort of decision.  However, I will to my dying day stand tall for all women to retain the right to make their own choices.

“Abortion” as a search term had been blocked in POPLINE, the largest reproductive health database, according to an April 2 post by Women’s Health News blogger Rachel Walden. The research database is funded by the federal government as a project of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The result is that a person who types abortion in to the database for a keyword search will retrieve no articles on the topic.

Database officials advised a librarian who queried about the omission that the term “unwanted pregnancy” should be substituted instead. A more difficult search through the database’s index can still be used to retrieve abortion-related articles, but most average library users will not know the workaround, Walden, who is a librarian, points out in her post.

The database is funded through the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is prohibited from distributing foreign aid to international groups that provide abortions, make abortion referrals or lobby for change in their nation’s abortion laws, under the so-called global gag rule policy of the Bush administration.

On April 4, apparently in response to bloggers, Michael J. Klag, dean of the Bloomberg School, reversed the decision to remove “abortion” as a search term and said he would launch an inquiry into the change. In a statement published on the school’s Web site, Klag said that USAID had found two items in the database that did not meet POPLINE’s criteria for “evidence-based information” and administrators decided to remove the search term.

Join Councilmember Steve Leal as we dedicate the Cesar Chavez Labor Bridge this Friday at 10:30!

Come and share a very special time as we dedicate the Cesar Chavez Labor Bridge. This has been a public art project over 7 years in the making. The theme was generated by Councilman Steve Leal and many Southside neighbors. The imagery was primarily created by artists Alex Garza and Josh Sarantitis, along with significant neighborhood input. We feel that this will become known as one of the most important pieces of public art in the Western United States. This public art project exemplifies one of the great stories of how people used their civil rights to improve their conditions and change the world. We thought it appropriate that this project be on a bridge, as our civil rights are a bridge to justice. Please come. There will be food, music and a lot of your friends. Friday, April 4, 10:30am at the Southeast Corner of 6th & 1-10. (Parking available at 3300 S. 6th Avenue in the old Southgate Shopping Center)