There's more than one way

When Emory University incoming senior Nora Kleinman discovered last winter that the cost of NuvaRing, her preferred method of birth control, had nearly doubled at her campus health center- going from $27 to $44 a month-she was forced to make a quick decision: find a way to come up with an extra $204 a year or switch to her parents’ insurance plan, and thus give up the privacy she had enjoyed at the student health clinic. “Everybody’s fairly irritated about it,” says Kleinman.

“Myself and so many other women I know were depending on health services at universities for cheap and affordable contraception.”Millions of women who purchase contraceptives at student and community health clinics across the country have seen prices go from about $10 a month to anywhere between $30 and $50. Such out-of-reach prices are putting intense financial stress on women who can’t afford to pay retail for birth control. And the pressure goes beyond the individual level: Some family planning clinics serving low-income women may be forced to shut down if prices aren’t soon reduced, leaving poor women with even fewer resources to determine the number and spacing of their children.

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