Popline blocking searches on “abortion”

Popline, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is a government-funded public database for research on population issues and reproductive health. I’ve been aware of it as an excellent resource for some time.

The news: Gloria Won, a medical librarian at the University of California, San Francisco, noticed on Monday that the word “abortion” has stopped bringing up results. A little digging around and she determined that the word “abortion” has been turned into a stopword in the database.

Wired Magazine’s Threat Level blog has a pretty decent, if brief, article on it. The blog The Experiment has a good entry on it. I’m late in mentioning it, but feel that it’s something I can’t ignore…

UPDATE: Access restored.