The World - News from Feb. 13, 1986

A public uproar has erupted in Sweden over the use of data banks after it was reported that the abortions of 165,000 Swedish women were recorded in a secret register. The government’s Data Inspection Board said scientists at the Karolinska Institute had assembled the file on women who had legal abortions between 1966 and 1974. The institute, a world-famous research center that chooses the winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine, used the file in a study of the links between abortion and cancer. However, none of the women were told that their names were on the institute’s computers.