As a librarian for over 30 years, I've seen my share of April Fools jokes. But this year's seemed more outrageous – and less funny -- than in previous years. A librarian at the University of California/San Francisco Medical Center sent an inquiry to staff at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health when she found discrepancies in POPLINE searches that included the term “abortion.” On April 1, she received the following response from Debbie Dickson at POPLINE: “Yes we did make a change in POPLINE. We recently made all abortion terms stop terms. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now. In addition to the terms you're already using, you could try using ‘Fertility Control, Postconception.' This is the broader term to our ‘abortion' terms and most records have both in the keyword fields…” In effect, the word “abortion” was downgraded from a medical search term to the status of words such as “a” and “the.”

More than two months after the beginning of the new 2008 fiscal year, the White House and Congress have finally reached agreement on a massive FY 2008 omnibus spending bill.

Tomorrow, on World AIDS Day, let's talk about sex. 80% of new HIV infections are sexually transmitted; let's stop pretending that sex isn't happening and start making it safer.

Question: What do you do with a $100 million U.S. government program that isn't working? The answer; you fix it. Abstinence and be-faithful programs for youth in the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) are not meeting the needs of sexually active and at-risk youth, according to a government-commissioned evaluation that took place in March. Eight months later, no plan has been put into place to address these flaws – endangering the millions of young people these programs are supposed to help protect.

“For every person who began antiretroviral therapy in 2006, six people were newly infected,” according to a new report from the Global HIV Prevention Working Group. Without a major scale-up of HIV prevention programs, using existing prevention tools, 60 million more HIV infections are projected to occur by 2015. The best of the best have confirmed what many knew to be true: Only by significantly ramping up HIV prevention programs can we curb the scourge of HIV/AIDS. If the world does not listen, and new HIV infections continue to grow as they are, we'll have no one to blame but ourselves. The members of this group are the most knowledgeable experts on HIV prevention in the world and they have rung an alarm bell that world leaders must heed in order to put an end to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Too often, it is women who make-and disproportionately bear the brunt of-reproductive health decisions on behalf of a couple. Women are the ones who risk dying from complications in pregnancy and childbirth. And if a mother dies, her daughters-not her sons-tend to be the ones who leave school to care for their families. Sadly, men more often hold the power in decision making, both at a personal and at a political level. PAI urges men to be the strongest allies in improving the health and well-being of women-whether as partners or politicians-by engaging in the fight to save the lives of their wives, sisters, daughters, mothers and other women in their community.

With further Senate action on the appropriations bill exempting contraceptives from the Global Gag Rule not likely until September, this is the perfect moment to highlight the importance of increasing access to contraceptives, which is crucial to global development and the fight against poverty.

“When you are married, you do not have the right to say ‘no'” -- Skytt Nzambu These are the words of Skytt Nzambu, a Kenyan woman who was infected with HIV by her unfaithful husband. Tragically, Skytt is only one of an increasing number of HIV infections that are occurring within married couples, according to information reported at last week's HIV/AIDS Implementers' Meeting in Rwanda.

Population Action International celebrated an important victory for women and their families last week, as Congress passed a Foreign Operations Appropriations bill (H.R. 2764) that contained language correcting some of the most egregious aspects of U.S. international sexual and reproductive health policy.

Family planning and reproductive health supporters are on the verge of a very important show-down in the House of Representatives on the issues of access to contraceptives and abstinence-only HIV/AIDS prevention restrictions