Dale Ahlquist sent along a "heads up" about one of the latest examples of political correctness gone goofy. It's the story of Popline, the world's largest health-information search engine, deciding that abortion is so doggone controversial that they'll just rig their database to ignore it altogether. That's right; the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who runs the system (funded by the U.S. government, no less) have revised the process so that so that queries on "abortion" yield nothing at all, despite the fact that the database actually includes more than 25,000 documents on the subject.Debbie Dickson of the Popline database told the Chronicle of Higher Education that they're afraid the school it will lose its federal funding by providing the information. "We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now."
