In the nearly 14 years during which I have been writing this column I have never spoken of abortion. My reason for this is not political, it is personal.

My mother was a war bride and I was unplanned. My father disappeared only weeks after I was born. I was raised by my mother and grandparents until I was 8 and then my mother remarried and I lived with her and my stepfather. Our relations were strained.

When I was 21 and about to leave for England for graduate school my mother informed me that she had been pressured to have an abortion instead of keeping me, but that she had resisted and, thereby, given me life when others would have denied that to me. She never really explained why she resisted, however.

Was it a moral decision on her part? Was it fear of the medical uncertainties or of criminal prosecution? I’ll never know, since my mother never spoke of this again. What I do know is that my birth made my mother’s life infinitely more difficult and, although she never complained, I knew that this was true.

My feelings about abortion are closely tied to this experience. I believe that a woman’s body is her own and that the government should not tell her what to do with it since having a baby will change her life forever. And yet, I know, that had abortion been legal and easily available when I was in my mother’s womb, I might never have lived.

This has created an emotional and intellectual conflict which I can never resolve. And that’s why I’ve never written about abortion and whether it should be legal. But last week something happened which made me decide, at long last, to broach the subject, at least in a small way, in these pages.

Last week, one of my students sent me an e-mail with an Internet link to a story about a medical Web site maintained by Johns Hopkins University. This Web site was maintained by the university to provide free medical information searches. According to the article I was sent, Johns Hopkins had decided to block searches containing the word “abortion” on the grounds that the Web site was federally funded and that searches about “abortion” violated federal policies.

The block did not last very long; the dean of Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health which maintained the site, once he was informed of the situation, ordered that the block be removed. His reasoning, with which I fully agree, was that information about abortion, particularly when presented in a neutral fashion, should not be offensive, even to those who oppose the procedure. Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of our Constitution and our republic.

Not surprisingly, there were many pages of comments on the Web about the block and its removal from people on both sides of the abortion issue. But I have to say that, as ambivalent as I am about the issue itself, I believe strongly that the dean was right in his decision and not simply on freedom of speech grounds.

I believe that when a woman decides whether to have an abortion, it should be an informed decision. I think it is a mistake to try to keep women ignorant about the procedure no matter whether you are pro-choice or pro-life. And I believe that this is important both for the woman and her child. Why? Because if a woman chooses to have a child, she should do so affirmatively, not by default, since it will change her life profoundly. She should do so because she wants her child, not because she doesn’t know that there are alternatives.

I’m not saying that I favor abortion. As I’ve explained, this is a subject about which I cannot make a dispassionate choice. But we must permit every pregnant woman to have information. Let people on both sides present their arguments and be their most persuasive. But do not leave women ignorant. To do otherwise would be wrong both to the women and to their children.