USAID employees trawling POPLINE, a database used by demographers and researchers in reproductive health, found two articles dealing with abortion advocacy, which they say did not fit the database’s criteria. And so POPLINE administrators made “abortion” an invisible search term, like the words “the” or “a”. The move was spotted by librarians at UCSF, who raised hell. Eventually, the clamour reached the ears of Michael Klag, dean of the school of public health at Johns Hopkins University, which houses the database. He made abortion visible again, double-quick.

My question is: why are US taxpayers paying salaries for people to trawl through 360,000 articles to find two that may be “not consistent with the cirteria”? Was it USAID staff who were doing this work? Or was the work done for them by some lobbyist group, producing a knee-jerk response of self-censorship? That was what happened back in 2003, when the Traditional Values Coalition made lists of federally funded research dealing with offensive people such as sex workers and drug users. It was after they passed these lists to Congress that NIH started calling researchers in to justify themselves and their previously-approved studies. And after that that some researchers just decided not to do, or not to publicise, research that Congress considers icky.

I suspect that the terrorists have succeeded, as good terrorists do, in trapping us in great round of fear. POPLINE staff restrict abortion as a search word because they fear they will lose USAID funding. USAID trawls through databases in search of abortion-related wickedness because it fears it will lose Congresional funding. But USAID can only lose funding if Congress decides to cut its funding. And Congress is made up of men and women who, at least ostensibly, want to please the constituents who vote for them. So Congress will only cut funding for USAID if it fears voters will throw them out if they spend money on useful databases of 360,000 articles, two of which talk about abortion advocacy. Since the majority of members of Congress are Democrats, that seems like an unlikely outcome.

It’s time that Democrats in Congress started to realise that when they’re making public health policy, they’ve got nothing to fear but fear itself. They should not leave it to librarians to defend democracy in the United States.

(If any kind librarian can point me to two offending articles now removed from POPLINE, I’d be agog tp read them).

Today, the US House of Representatives discusses a bill that will take US$ 50 billion out of taxpayers’ pockets and put it on the table for HIV treatment for people in poor countries. There’s some prevention in the new PEPFAR bill, too, though we’re still not allowed to use the money effectively to make life safer for people who inject drugs or sell sex. The new bill will increase the amount of money we can spend preventing HIV infected women passing the virus on to their infants (that cost US taxpayers US$ 195 million in 2007 alone). But not one cent will be available for services or advice that would prevent those women getting pregnant in the first place.

Why not? Apparently, because of aggressive lobbying on the part of an increasingly vocal anti-conctraception movement in Washington. The original draft bill reauthorising PEPFAR recognised that reproductive health services and HIV prevention should go hand in hand in countries where HIV is spread mostly in non-commercial sex between men and women (in other words in all of East and Southern Africa, and some of West Africa too). (see the draft text here). Then the Fundamentalists stuck their oar in. By the time the bill got through the House Foreign Affairs Committee, no PEPFAR money could be used to provide contraceptive advice or services for couples with HIV (though they may still get some condoms for disease prevention.

The hyper-conservative Family Research Council was one of the groups lobbying for the change, and FRC President Tony Perkins crowed about the victory in a press release:

“This bill is a marked improvement and is aimed at protecting life, not destroying it. …I especially applaud Rep. Chris Smith for his tireless work to ensure that PEPFAR does not create new family planning programs to fund international abortion groups.”

On their own website, FRC are even more explicit:

“Additionally the bill removes the “reproductive health” references that the Democratic majority was trying to insert.”

American Christians ranting about abortion is hardly stop-the-presses stuff. But there’s a not-so-subtle slide in the rhetoric these days: in the minds of the Hard Core, contraception is now equivalent to abortion. Pro-life is becoming anti-contraception, and no amount of common sense commentary seems to make any difference. If the good pastors of the United States wish to have no sex or large families, rah rah for them. But Congress should not allow them to impose their obsessions on the rest of the world. The current PEPFAR bill will do just that.

If you have any doubts about the move to smush contraception together with abortion into one big, evil, liberal, feminazi assault on what is Good and Right, take a minute and a half to look at this: