University Health Services: Fighting the Baby Boom?

Over the last several years, the University Health Services has tried to become more useful to undergraduates who need sex counseling, birth control or abortion referral. The health insurance offered undergraduates, however, does not reflect his trend.

Every undergraduate at Harvard is automatically covered by a group Blue Cross/Blue Shield policy. Harvard's group policy is widely considered to be one of the best available to students at the lowest cost, covering almost every service unavailable at UHS.

For women, however, the "almost all" leaves out one very important thing: pregnancy.

Since the Supreme Court ruling made abortions legal at the discretion of a woman and her doctor, Blue Cross/Blue Shield has become a little more cautious about paying for abortions, Kathleen Kirkman, staff assistant for student insurance, said Tuesday. A pregnant woman wanting an abortion referral from UHS must have her case certified by UHS physicians, and they must decide that the abortion is a therapeutic measure.

Lacking a clear medical reason for an abortion, the pregnant woman must get psychological documentation of the abortion's necessity.

"We are in a continuing dialogue with Blue Cross/Blue Shield to try to get them to change these requirements," Dr. Preston K. Munter, Chief of Psychiatry at UHS, said yesterday. "We think that the best procedure for abortions would be the one requiring the least bureaucratic shuffling," he said.

Munter said, however, that although a woman must see a psychiatrist or psychologist to have her abortion paid for, "it's not very difficult to get us to certify the necessity of an abortion."

For pregnant single undergraduates who decide not to terminate the pregnancy, however, the possibility for medical insurance payments are practically nonexistent.

The individual policy each undergraduate has provides absolutely no maternity coverage. Kirkman said that an unmarried woman wanting pregnancy coverage would have to buy the kind of joint policy normally sold to husbands and wives. However, she said, the policy costs more than two individual policies and for an unmarried couple, provides routine coverage only for the woman.

"I thought we had gotten them [Blue Cross/Blue Shield] to agree to cover pregnancies. If it remains the way it is now, it is definitely a financial inducement for a woman to abort," Munter said.

He added that he had heard of no cases where a woman had wanted a baby but had chosen abortion for financial reasons.