Siri, the voice-activated personal assistant baked into Apple's iPhone 4S, is supposed to be a technological wunderkind. Tell it to generate a list of the best Chinese restaurants in Washington, DC, and it does so in a matter of seconds. Ask Siri to find you local pharmacies that sell, say, Viagra, and it shows you relevant pharmacy addresses and phone numbers in a pinch.

Ask Siri, though, to find you a local abortion clinic (via commands and questions like "Find me an abortion clinic…" or "I need an abortion…" or "Where can I get an abortion?") and Siri comes back with a surprising response:

There is a Planned Parenthood clinic that provides abortion services less than a mile from here (in Washington, DC) — and yet Siri only comes back with two recommendations 26 miles and 74 miles away! Far worse, both of these "abortion clinics" are in fact Crisis Pregnancy Centers that do not provide abortion services and attempt to "counsel" women out of having abortions, often through misinformation. For those of us in the sexual health field, this is simply infuriating. For anyone who is genuinely trying to locate medical care, this could result in an hour-long drive only to be met with misinformation, judgment, and scorn.

If you ask specifically for Planned Parenthood, you get this:

Of course, many Planned Parenthood clinics do not provide abortion services — and many other medical facilities do.

When it comes to birth control, things get even stranger. Siri immediately apologizes because it "couldn't find any birth control clinics" — even though it just pointed out six Planned Parenthood locations!

If you simply want to refill your birth control prescription, you get the same unhelpful response. Weirdly, a generic request about prescription refills pulls up a detailed list of drug stores. Maybe Siri just doesn't understand how to answer a question about a specific prescription. That would make sense — until you actually ask Siri the question. Need a Viagra refill? You get the exact same helpful list of pharmacies as before.

Searches for "emergency contraception" most often leads to a list of emergency rooms, while requests for "Plan B," "Plan B One Step," and "the Morning After Pill" all result in web searches. These lead to helpful results, but there is no justifiable reason why emergency contraception should be different than looking for Tylenol.

So what's happening here? One might conclude that this is simply a regrettable instance of product failure (Siri and the iPhone 4S were only released last month, after all), but other results seem to indicate otherwise. For example, tell it to find you the nearest "Crisis Pregnancy Centers" — again, these are anti-choice front groups that brazenly provide their visitors with medically dangerous lies about abortion care — and Siri has no problem at all:

A number of bloggers (hat tips especially to The Abortioneers and Amadi) have done some thorough testing of the Siri platform, in order to figure out if Apple is indeed engaging here in some kind of politically motivated censorship. If so, let's be clear: such censorship-through-deliberate-programming would amount to nothing less than moral cowardice. And it doesn't matter if the decision was made by a single engineering team, the company's executives, or the PR team: abortion services, birth control, and other kinds of reproductive health care are often searched for online, and any hijacking of these commands would represent a cynical but also nonsensical fear about what social conservatives might say about Apple products.

Of course, since we don't have access to the Siri codebase, we'll never know for sure. That said, we do know what Apple should do in order to address the problem at hand: it needs to fix Siri immediately so that the above searches yield real AND accurate results. For a company like Apple — whose brand reputation is based in large part on its uncompromising dedication to product design and the end-user experience — fixing Siri to seamlessly handle searches for incredibly common questions like "Where can I find birth control?" and "Where can I find an abortion?" is a complete no-brainer.