Those not regularly reading the Radreffies' blogs aggregator might have missed Lia Friedman's post about how POPLINE, a government funded "...database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues." (emphasis added) has made "abortion" a stop word. If you're not up on your library jargon, that means it treats "abortion" the same way it would the word "the"--ignores it.
- Go to POPLINE's search interface
- Type the word "abortion" (sans quotes) in the Subject box
- Click Search
- Wish that you'd been wearing a hat so that after your head exploded you'd been able to find all the pieces.
- If you're still able to communicate coherently, call or write the bastards at Johns Hopkins carrying out the government's war on information. Or take some other kind of direct action if that's your thing.
PS I looked at their keyword guide (that's "thesaurus" to you and me out there in library land), and it's adorable how their cross references seem to be just about the same as LC's but instead of term, they use "keyword." i.e. Where in LC it would be RT for "related term," in POPLINE it's RK for "related keyword." People if you're using the words the same way, you haven't changed anything but the nomenclature!
And by the way, "abortion" is in the thesaurus.