Ingeniero

More Access to Contraceptives in City Schools
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
Published: September 23, 2012
A New York City pilot program to distribute morning-after pills and other contraceptives to highschool students has encountered little resistance from parents since it began early last year, health officials said Sunday.

The officials said the program was an expansion of a similar programrun by privately operated school-based health centers around the city for several years. The newer program uses doctors from the health department, who prescribe contraceptives, and school nurses.About a quarter of high school students have access to privately operated health centers. The city-run program originally extended contraceptive services to 14 more schools, or another 5 percent ofstudents, but one campus has since dropped out.
The high schools, including Fashion Industries in Manhattan and Susan E. Wagner on Staten Island, were chosen because they had a dearth of health servicesnearby and they served a student population known to have a higher risk of pregnancy, for a variety of reasons, the department said.
Only 1 percent to 2 percent of parents returned a form to optout of the program. The form allowed them to select any or all of four types of reproductive services that they did not want their child to receive, including emergency contraception, birth controlpills, pregnancy testing or condoms.
“In New York City, over 7,000 young women become pregnant by age 17 — 90 percent of which are unplanned,” Alexandra Waldhorn, a health department spokeswoman, said.“We are committed to trying new approaches, like this pilot program in place since January 2011, to improve a situation that can have lifelong consequences.”
The so-called Catch program — which standsfor Connecting Adolescents to Comprehensive Healthcare — was first reported on Sunday in The New York Post. The program began with 5 schools in January 2011 and later expanded to 14. It is down...