The only thing that kept Katie Bosch from using Northwestern’s Searle Student Health Service to get a prescription for birth control was the information session that students must attend before going on the pill, the Weinberg junior said.

“I put off going there for a year because I didn’t want to do that session,” said Bosch, who eventually got her prescription from Planned Parenthood.

But now a policy change will get rid of the requirement, instead making it only a recommendation.

The session, taught by peer reproductive health educators, instructs women seeking hormonal birth control or scheduled for their first gynecological exam on safe-sex practices, sexual anatomy and different contraceptive methods. But many students said they found the sessions unnecessary and even embarrassing.

“I thought it was ridiculous that I had to go,” said Bosch, who attended a session at the beginning of Fall Quarter after she considered switching her prescription to Searle. “It was uncomfortable and, besides that, it just felt silly when I knew everything they were teaching me.”

Dr. Donald Misch, NU’s director of Health Service, said the sessions provide beneficial information to students and are a good idea in theory.

“It wasn’t done to make people’s lives difficult,” he said. “It was started for a really good reason, and starting it was a good idea.”

Still Misch said that after he started his job five months ago, he received negative feedback about the sessions, and he decided to stop requiring them.

“I’ve heard from women across the campus … who had concerns about it and felt that its benefits were being outweighed by the sense of it being an obstacle,” Misch said. “We still strongly recommend and encourage it, but it didn’t make sense to me that we continue to insist that you have it.”

As a result of the change, Misch said Health Service will begin offering more reproductive health firesides at residence halls and will post more information on its Web site. Also in an effort to bring reproductive-health education to more men, Health Service will hold its first “men’s-only” information session at 7 p.m. Dec. 3. The session will feature information about male sexual responsibilities, normal male sexual functioning and “what women want,” Misch said.

Ellen Stolar, president of the newly formed reproductive rights group Vox, said the change in policy will erase the “barrier” that previous policy presented.

“At least based on responses that other students have given, they all found (the session) more embarrassing than informative,” said Stolar, a Weinberg sophomore.

The policy change will take effect immediately, Misch said. And any woman who has already signed up for a session still can attend, but is not required to.

Associated Student Government Senate passed a bill Spring Quarter asking Health Service to make the change, but when the bill’s authors approached Misch on Nov. 14, he told them the changes were already being made.

“It was one of the relatively infrequent times when we were able to say, ‘Done,'” Misch said. “Given that they raised the issue too, it was part of the reason we said, ‘Well, heck, maybe we can get this done before Thanksgiving.'”