Starting folic acid more than three months before pregnancy will not increase its effectiveness. Furthermore, if you take folic acid for all four years of college, but then stop taking it for some time before becoming pregnant, the risk of your baby having a birth defect will not decrease. Encouraging all female students to take folic acid implies that all female students should prepare for unplanned pregnancy in the next three months. Kling says, nobody can know when they are three months out from pregnancy. This assumption of uncertainty ignores women's choices about sex, birth control, and abortion.
Many women consider their views on abortion before becoming sexually active.
While some may change their minds after becoming pregnant, it is not impossible for a woman to know that she will not give birth in the near future. Tao asserted that the undergraduate community has more unplanned pregnancies than others. However, when I asked her how many of those pregnancies are aborted, how many end in miscarriages, and how many result in birth defects, she was unsure. However, Dr. Rosenthal asserts that only a small percentage of Harvard students have unwanted pregnancies and that this percentage is getting smaller each year. He attributed the decreasing number of unplanned pregnancies to a rise in awareness about pregnancy and contraception, and noted that a very large number of students come to UHS to find out about getting on the pill.