NYC’s Barnard College will offer abortion pills to students following Roe V. Wade overturn

Barnard College, a private women’s college in New York City where tuition costs $57.00 a year, will offer abortion pills to students by next year.

School officials announced Thursday that Barnard will work to ensure student access to abortion health care in response to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

In a statement to students, university officials wrote: “Barnard applies a reproductive justice and gender-affirming framework to all of its student health and wellness services, and in particular reproductive health services.

‘We are strengthening these services in the post-Roe context.’

The school is the last to offer such services to its students after Massachusetts and California passed laws to do the same for their public colleges by 2023.

Bernard President Sian Beilock (left) and Marina Catallozzi, the school’s health official, said the move was implemented after the Supreme Court overthrows Roe v. Wade.

While New York continues to provide access to abortions, 22 states have enacted laws banning the procedure.

A majority of the laws were enacted immediately after the Supreme Court decision over the summer abolished women’s federal rights to abortion.

Bernard President Sian Beilock said the university’s intent was to prepare for every possible barrier to entry in the state to defend the reproductive rights of its students.

“I think we’re putting a mark on the ground that we believe that health and wellness is really the institution’s responsibility to students, and we want to do everything we can to support our students,” she told the New York Times.

Marina Catallozzi, Barnard’s chief health officer, said the new program would provide students with more privacy on the campus, which already has an emergency contraception vending machine.

“In any decision about reproductive health, but especially around pregnancy,” she told the Times. ‘We want to make sure that students have every option: if they want to continue the pregnancy, if they want to continue and adopt adoption, if they want to abort.’

The chief health officer added that the option could help students if abortion services in New York were ever overcrowded by out-of-state residents seeking the procedure because it was banned in their state.

Public colleges in Massachusetts and California are also poised to offer similar services to distribute the pills (pictured) to their students by 2023

Barnard already has a vending machine that dispenses abortion pills to students

While New York has not enacted laws for public schools to provide this type of service to their students, Massachusetts and California have.

Over the summer, Massachusetts passed a law requiring public colleges to file plans to provide abortion pills to students by November 2023.

California passed its own law to do the same in 2019, and the legislation will be enforced in January.

Conversely, at the University of Idaho, officials sent a memo to all staff about restrictions at the school following the near-total abortion ban in the states.

Workers were warned not to advise patients about abortion or refer them to abortion services at the risk of being charged with a felony, fired and permanently banned from working for the state.