No Sequels Allowed

Below the Belt: A Biweekly Column by NOW President Kim Gandy

April 10, 2008

Once again, we return to our regularly scheduled programming on CMN-Conservative Misinformation Network, also known as the Bush administration. This tragic farce, now in its eighth season, showcases your tax dollars at work in support of the administration's assault on science, reproductive freedom, access to information, and the health of women around the globe.

In this latest installment, Gloria Won, a librarian at the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center, was having difficulty retrieving information about abortion on the POPLINE website. Self-identified as "the world's largest database on reproductive health," POPLINE is run out of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health [emphasis mine].

Won contacted POPLINE and was told that the term "abortion" had been blocked in the website's search engine. Say what?

Well, POPLINE is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID is the federal office in charge of providing foreign aid, including health care funding, to developing nations and non-governmental organizations.

In case you missed the premiere episode of CMN's programming, on George Bush's very first day in the Oval Office back in 2001, he reinstated the infamous Mexico City Policy -- dubbed the Global Gag Rule by women's rights advocates -- which had been instituted under the Reagan administration and overturned by President Bill Clinton. This policy prohibits USAID funding of international family planning organizations that offer abortion counseling, information or services, even if they do so with their own locally raised funds.

According to a report by National Public Radio, USAID contacted POPLINE in February, concerned about certain articles available on the website -- articles published by an international reproductive rights organization that focused on abortion as a human rights issue. Administrators for the website removed these items and then went a dramatic step further by blocking the word "abortion" entirely in the search engine.

"As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now," a POPLINE administrator explained to Won in an April 1 email. Won and her supervisor, Gail Sorrough, immediately got the word out to other librarians via a listserve, and the story caught fire on the web.

The librarians got results. In an April 4 statement Dean Michael J. Klag said: "I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have directed that the POPLINE administrators restore 'abortion' as a search term immediately. . . . The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction."

What have we learned here, other than not to mess with librarians?! We've also learned that CMN is nothing if not consistent. Yes, the administrators at POPLINE overreacted, but they did so out of a reality-based fear of losing funding from an ideologically driven Bush administration.

I've written in this column countless times about Bush's aversion to science, his indifference toward medically-accurate information, and his outright hostility toward providing women with the full range of reproductive health options that are their right.

Recently I've discussed the Bush administration's custom of appointing doctors from the ultra-conservative fringe to critical family planning and other health posts, as well as its devotion to ineffective abstinence-only sex education.

But even more examples are worthy of our attention. Since 2002, the Bush administration has suspended U.S. contributions to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) , based on allegations that organizations receiving these family planning funds helped to provide abortions to China. This suspension persists despite the administration's own emissary's findings that no evidence exists to support those allegations.

In 2004 a report by the National Council for Research on Women revealed that the Bush administration quietly deleted and altered information on women's issues from government agency websites. For example, information about the use of condoms to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases was changed to say that the effectiveness of condoms was "inconclusive." The National Cancer Institute's website was changed in 2002 to say studies linking abortion and breast cancer were inconsistent; an outcry from scientists resulted in an amendment to say abortion is not associated with an increased risk.

Fortunately this eight-year run of CMN is finally coming to a close. But what will replace it? An administration that will put an end to attacks on women's rights, that will promote and advance the health of women in the U.S. and worldwide? An administration that respects science, that doesn't replace sound medical advice with ideology?

Or, what if we end up with a Bush sequel that looks frighteningly like the last eight years? If Sen. John McCain becomes the next president of the United States, he will carry on Bush's tradition of chipping away at women's reproductive rights and putting their well-being, their futures, their very lives at risk here and abroad.

Don't be fooled by McCain's reputation as a "maverick" -- he and the media may be fond of this myth, but it doesn't stand up to the facts. McCain has a solidly anti-choice voting record. On his campaign website , he lists reproductive issues under the banner "Human Dignity & the Sanctity of Life."

The site states: "John McCain believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the bench. Constitutional balance would be restored by the reversal of Roe v. Wade , returning the abortion question to the individual states." It goes on even further, saying that we must "end abortion at the state level" as well.

McCain has voted against comprehensive sex education and in favor of the 2003 abortion procedure ban. He voted to confirm Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito, and you can bet that he will nominate conservative justices if given the chance.

We simply cannot allow McCain and his faith-based "armies of compassion" (yes, he used that term) to conduct a 100-year occupation of women's uteruses. That's one drama that should never make it to primetime.

 

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