I f you think that some of the Bush administration's conservative politics – and Orwellian moves – in the U.S. can't affect Canada, then you have some research to do.

Ten days ago at the University of California in San Francisco, librarian Gloria Won was running through POPLINE (POPulation information onLINE), billed as "the world's largest database on reproductive health." Maintained by Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, and freely available to medical schools, health organizations and the public, it is funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Won was stymied. Entering the keyword "abortion," she kept getting the message "No records found." Odd, because she had done a similar search in January and found thousands of scholarly and peer-reviewed articles on the subject. When she emailed POPLINE, database manager Debra Dickson replied: "We recently made all abortion terms stop words."

Which means that, just like "the" and "and" and other words databases and browsers such as Google ignore, POPLINE would not recognize "abortion."

Because?

"As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now," explained Dickson, who suggested that Won search with "fertility control" or "postconception" instead.

George Orwell would have called this a "thoughtcrime."

That's because, on his very first full day as U.S. president in 2001, George W. Bush resurrected the "global gag rule," which makes nongovernmental organizations certify that they "will not perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning" if they want USAID funding.

First enacted under Ronald Regan and briefly rescinded by Bill Clinton, it's estimated that this restriction has cost the lives of some 70,000 women who have sought out back-alley abortions.

By late last week, censorship was the talk of the librarian community. And no wonder. This is the kind of thing China does when you search "Tiananmen Square."

That's when University of Waterloo library associate Sara Perkins tipped me.

"I mean, research being censored at the university level? I really didn't think the U.S. could surprise me anymore," Perkins emailed, echoing the views of David Dillard, a medical librarian at Temple University in Philadelphia.

It was on one of his librarian web- lists that the outrage spread, as researchers across North America speculated how much more information the administration will quash.

The record is stunning.

So far, the Bush administration has closed Environmental Protection Agency libraries. It has also dismantled PubSCIENCE, another publicly available scholarly database, because it competed with private sector services. And it severely weakened ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center), a storehouse of studies on education.

"There's been so much suppressed information," Dillard told me.

Even Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's dean was aghast when he discovered what had happened.

"I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have directed that the POPLINE administrators restore `abortion' as a search term immediately," said Dr. Michael Klag in a statement last Friday, adding that his school is "dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction."

Yesterday Klag announced POPLINE was not ordered by USAID to drop "abortion." Turns out that, in February, the government agency discovered two articles that did not fit its abortion "criteria." When POPLINE staff found five more offending articles, they killed the keyword until some 25,000 more containing "abortion" could be checked.

Such is Bush's America where you have to watch what you say – and where women have to watch what they do.

And so, rather than risk losing its funding, an organization dedicated to health research and medical information would send "abortion" down the memory hole.

But there's more than a word at stake here – it's an indicator of how, both in Canada and the U.S., women's reproductive choices, are also threatened with erasure.

Antonia Zerbisias is a Living section columnist. azerbisias@thestar.ca. She blogs at thestar.blogs.com.