**Pissed**

It is one thing to have a public administrative position against abortion, but it is another to rig the most comprehensive medical database so that one can't find information, or after allowing use of the search term again, removing articles that are pro-abortion. What happened to the the principle of challenging ideas one opposes with other ideas? Mill and Milton and Justice Holmes are probably turning over in their graves.

From the NY Times:
April 5, 2008

Health Database Was Set Up to Ignore ‘Abortion’

By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — Johns Hopkins University said Friday that it had programmed its computers to ignore the word “abortion” in searches of a large, publicly financed database of information on reproductive health after federal officials raised questions about two articles in the database. The dean of the Public Health School lifted the restrictions after learning of them.

A spokesman for the school, Timothy M. Parsons, said the restrictions were enforced starting in February.

Johns Hopkins manages the population database known as Popline with money from the Agency for International Development.

Popline is the world’s largest database on reproductive health, with more than 360,000 records and articles on family planning, fertility and sexually transmitted diseases.

Mr. Parsons said the development agency had expressed concern after finding “two articles about abortion advocacy” in the database. The articles, he said, did not fit database criteria and were removed......

For the rest of the story: click here.