Call it censored, call it buried, call it lost—the search term “abortion” was all of the above for approximately a month on POPLINE—a publicly-funded database that its administrators describe as “Your connection to the world’s reproductive health literature.”Last week, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, uncovered this ironic situation while trying to “connect” to “reproductive health literature.” Health care providers, researchers, and advocates around the country were alarmed to learn that POPLINE (POPulation information onLINE), had rendered the search term “abortion” a stopword—which directs the database to ignore the term when used in a search. UCSF librarians discovered...