censorship

Over the holiday weekend, a firestorm let loose on the Internet: For no apparent reason, books on Amazon.com with feminist, LGBT and sexual-empowerment themes were removed from the sales rankings, numbers that show how well a product is performing on the website.

My book, like many, many others, has recently been deranked by Amazon. The books this primarily appears to have impacted are those by LGBT authors, young adult or children's books addressing sexuality, and some feminist titles.

Last week, 3,000 copies of the New School Free Press were stolen on the day it was published.

Call it censored, call it buried, call it lost - the search term “abortion” was all of the above for approximately a month on POPLINE. “Contraception,” “sexuality,” and “reproductive health” are the next stopwords, unless we remain vigilant and protest loudly.

Why did the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's medical database black out the word "abortion" from its searchable terms? Does federal funding equal censorship? Update: The Dean of the School issues a statement and restores the word.

Silencing both sides of the reproductive rights debate is as insidious as silencing just one.