February 8, 2011
Students for Life of America has released a groundbreaking Health Care Study of 200 of the largest colleges and universities in the United States. The new study looked at the schools’ health care policies and to see if the school sponsored health care plans covered elective abortions. Students for Life found that 44.3% of schools who offered school sponsored health care plans covered elective abortions. Out of 200 schools, 194 have school sponsored health care plans. Eighty-six of the 194 plans cover elective abortions, and 38 of the 86 schools that offer abortion health care plans automatically charge their students for the abortion service.
Students for Life has further found that there could be federal funding of abortion for the plans through federal education grants such as Federal Pell Grants. You can read more about taxpayer funded student abortions here. In October, SFLA worked with a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives to write the U.S. Department of Education and inquire whether or not the Department was aware of this loophole. To date, the Department of Education has failed to respond.
This study reiterates the fact that the abortion industry directly targets the youth of America. Secretly placing abortion into student health care plans is not how we should be approaching education. Institutionalizing abortion in our health care system and in our higher education system is outrageous and cannot be permitted to continue. The Obama Administration, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid may have rammed pro-abortion Obamacare through the U.S. Congress, but colleges and universities have been doing it secretly for years.
More importantly, tax payers, through federal educational grants, have been paying for student abortions across the country, directly violating the Henry Hyde Amendment. U.S. tax payers should not be footing the bill for student abortions. Abortion is not health care. We must take abortion out of these institutions immediately. Abortion should not be a prerequisite for education.
In July 2010, Students for Life of America (SFLA) was informed that the University of North Carolina System had a new mandate on health care coverage for the 2010-2011 school year. The UNC System required its students to have health care and automatically enrolled them in a plan that covered elective abortions.
Following the discoveries at UNC, SFLA asked how many other top universities and colleges in the United States also compel their students to enroll in health care plans that cover elective abortion.
Students for Life researched the 200 largest universities in the United States to see how similar their plans were to North Carolina System’s plan. SFLA researched a) if the school required health care, b) if the school automatically charged a student’s account for health care, c) if the school offered a school sponsored health care plan, and d) if the school sponsored health care plan covered elective abortions.
Visit our website to find out more about the study and to see the full results.