Siri's only a month old and the service is already embroiled in a scandal. The dulcet toned digital personal assistant was accused by several blogs that it was blocking answers to questions about abortion or birth control.

Siri can answer a variety of questions that range from finding the nearest Italian restaurant to finding ways to hide a dead body but when users start asking about abortion or birth control the helpful assistant clams up. A blog called The Abortioneers pointed out this oversight when bloggers asked Siri a number of questions about abortion that it refused to answer.

"If abortion information is plentifully available on the interwebs, and Siri is pulling those types of requests from the web, why does Siri not have an answer about birth control or abortion?" asked the blog. "If you ask Siri where to bury a dead body, she seems to be full of ideas."

The Abortioneers asked their readers to experiment with their iPhones and report their findings. Several users said when they asked, "Where can I go to get an abortion?" they got answers like:

"I'm really sorry about this, but I can't take any requests right now. Please try again in a little while."

The unusual situation has spawned the usual conspiracy theories about some secret Apple agenda and that Siri was promoting pro-life. Breaking its usual code of silence Apple has said the search anomaly was a glitch and that Siri is still in "beta" mode.

"Our customers want to use Siri to find out all types of information," Natalie Kerris, an Apple spokesman told the NY Times Wednesday evening, "and while it can find a lot, it doesn't always find what you want. These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone, it simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better and we will in the coming weeks."

Another more plausible explanation is that Siri was developed by male developers who weren't thinking of women's issues when they wrote their dictionary of terms for Siri. The search results could also be the result of some websites SEO practices that ranked it high in whatever algorithm Siri uses.