Freewrite Friday – Vol. IV

It returns! At least I see The Absurdist is still on board with it. As for everyone else? Don’t know. I’ll continue to putter along with it until people tell me to stop.

Freewrite Friday entails locking oneself in a room with no windows and only red heat lamps. At that point, you’re supposed to disrobe completely except for one sock and then scream. That’s it. Oh, and some people have a custom afterwards of writing for five (and only five) minutes as a stream-of-consciousnes, cathartic way to really find out what’s up in ‘da brain.

I personally use this online timer and wear this sock.

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I just read an article in BoingBoing about the Popline Medical Database, provided by the Johns Hopkins University Department of Public Health. Apparently, starting a few days ago, a change was made to the search mechanism. There are over 25,000 publically accessible documents on which you can process searches. And people did. And it was good.

Starting a few days ago, they tweaked it a bit. Now if you enter the search term “abortion,” you automatically get zero results.

Why? Apparently it’s a condition of their federal funding.

Now — I don’t care which side of the abortion argument you fall on. I happen to be passionate about my own views, and I know that there are many who agree or disagree just as passionately as I do. But here’s the thing: what is this trying to accomplish? Is this a mechanism to just make people forget about abortion if the search term isn’t there to accompany it?

Abortion is an issue that will likely remain at the forefront of this country’s political debate — as it has been even before Roe vs. Wade went to the Supreme Court 35 years ago. Not talking about it is as worthwhile and potentially as successful as “abstinence only education” — both of which assume that if the kiddies don’t see the carrot dangling from the top of one’s field of vision, it simply won’t exist. But both of these topics do exist, especially amongst young adults who should really be educated about as many options as possible as to how they can live their lives responsibly. Censoring information just because some people don’t like it? How is anyone going to learn a damn thing from that?

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I’m still rather peeved about this. Feel free to read more here and, in the original cited Wired “Threat Level” blog here.

EDIT: I’m a bit relieved to discover that Johns Hopkins has done a 180 on this. Dr. Michael Klag, Dean of Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health, released a statement today saying that he was unaware of this, and that he has directed the POPLINE administrators to restore “abortion” as a search term. He also mentioned that he will launch an inquiry as to why this change occurred. I just tried searching on the term “abortion” and over 13,000 matches came up. I guess nobody would have noticed had it not been for those meddling kids…

… and that’s what scares me about policy changes like this — when they happen deliberately quietly it becomes dangerous territory, It turns into an environment which fosters institutional censorship without anyone knowing that certain information has been challenged. This is just one battle that has been fought. Hopefully the number will decrease…

Oh — and Epiphany is still tracking with the Freewrites. Yay ePip!