Trouble is, current and former students say, those exceptions can be hard to come by.
Jadis Armbruster, who graduated in 2013, says the school declined to prescribe the Pill to continue her treatments for PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome), a common disorder that, if untreated, can result in infertility and other medical conditions.
For Armbuster, who’d moved to New York from Missouri to attend Fordham, it was easier to cross her fingers and hope her illness didn’t get worse than to find a doctor in a New York.
“I could barely navigate the subway, let alone the city,” she writes via email to the Voice. She says Fordham nurses said they weren’t allowed to refer her to a doctor for the purposes of getting contraception, and seeing a doctor on her visits home felt too complicated: “It wasn’t impacting my quality of life in any substantial way, so it was easier to let it drop than take on NYC healthcare as a teenager alone.”
Rachel Field, 21, an organizer with the mostly anonymous SAGES, says that before attending Fordham she used birth control to prevent the growth of ovarian cysts. “I had been on Depo-Provera since I was 15,” the Fordham senior tells the Voice.
When Field moved from Massachusetts, she originally scheduled her injections — once every three months — to match up roughly with her visits home. When that became untenable, she went to the university health center, where a nurse refused to administer the injection. “I went off [the medication] for a month,” she says. Field eventually found a doctor in New York, but, she says, “After being so inconsistent, it made me feel so sick. It put a lot of strain on my body.”