The day after the election, Beth Ryan ordered two packages of emergency contraception pills and had them sent to her 27-year-old daughter.
“We all felt so helpless,” said Ms. Ryan, who lives in Florida, describing her fear that a second Trump administration could further threaten access to reproductive health care. After one of her daughter’s friends, who handles online orders at Target, said he was seeing a burst of demand for Plan B morning-after pills, Ms. Ryan purchased Plan B from Walmart for her daughter in Colorado.
“I think I felt better because I could control something,” she said. “I mean, it was something that you could do.”
Across the country, some women are taking similar steps, ordering emergency contraceptives, abortion pills or both.
There is no national data, but interviews with numerous providers of abortion and contraceptive drugs point to a surge in demand in the immediate aftermath of the election.
Wisp, a telehealth provider of medications for reproductive health, said that during the five days after the election it sold more than 10,000 Plan B pills, which do not require a prescription; it sold fewer than 5,000 pills in the same Wednesday-through-Sunday span the week before the election.
“Women are truly stocking up,” said Monica Cepak, the chief executive of Wisp, who added that many of those ordering are new patients and that 90 percent have purchased multipacks containing three or six pills.
The Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, or the MAP, which prescribes and ships abortion pills, received more than 1,000 inquiries for abortion medication on the day after the election — about seven times its typical rate before the election, said Dr. Angel M. Foster, the service’s director. The MAP is one of several organizations operating in states that have passed shield laws to protect abortion providers who send pills to women in states with abortion bans.
Dr. Foster said many of the inquiries came from women who were not pregnant but were seeking pills to have on hand for possible future use, a practice known as advance provision. On the medical questionnaires they fill out for the MAP, “the folks who are asking for pills for future use are writing comments to us that are like, ‘I’m terrified of a national abortion ban now that Trump was elected,’” Dr. Foster said, adding that “it’s very, very explicitly tied to the election results and fear about what’s going to happen.”
Mr. Trump has boasted about appointing the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, but has also made various statements about abortion that have made it difficult to predict what his administration will try to do. While he has at times articulated a strong anti-abortion message, most recently he has not seemed to support a national ban and has said states should set their own abortion policies.
He has spoken less often about morning-after pills and birth control but has made comments that make it difficult to interpret his views about those medications. His first administration issued rules that made it easier for employers to claim religious exemptions to avoid providing insurance coverage for prescription contraception under the Affordable Care Act.
Some of those ordering these medications say they are concerned that a White House and a Congress dominated by conservative Republicans will try to impose national policies or laws that will constrict availability in the future. Others say they are doing so to take a stand, to use their purchasing power as a message in support of reproductive freedom.
“I think it is uncertainty about what’s coming; I think it’s also activism,” said Julie F. Kay, a founder and the executive director of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine. Some people “see it as a statement, as a show of support,” she said.
Robin, 44, of Austin, Texas, who asked to be identified by her first name to protect her privacy, said she had never purchased or taken morning-after pills before, but soon after the election she ordered a six-pack of Plan B from Wisp.
“It’s really just that we don’t know what’s going to happen and what can be taken away next,” she said, adding that she ordered the pills because she began wondering, “What do I need to do, what can I do just to be safe in the future?” She said she bought multiple packs because she has friends who have needed emergency contraception in the past, “and if I can help them, I would love to.”
The groundswell of concern and stockpiling echoes the response to other recent periods of real and perceived threats to reproductive health. After the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the national right to abortion, reproductive health providers and businesses saw spikes in interest in many forms of contraception and in abortion pills. After the 2016 election, some women rushed to get intrauterine devices or long-acting contraceptive implants, worried that the incoming Trump administration would try to repeal the Affordable Care Act or curtail its requirement of insurance coverage for prescription contraception.
Ms. Cepak of Wisp and other providers of emergency contraception and abortion pills said that the biggest growth in demand was from women in states with abortion bans, but that there were also more orders than usual from people in states with strong reproductive health protections.
Dr. Foster said that for orders of abortion pills for possible future use, “we’re getting huge number of requests from folks from California, from New York,” reflecting fears about potential bans or restrictions at the national level.
While the spike in orders was steepest in the days immediately after the election, there continues to be increased interest, providers of the pills say.
Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch physician who founded Aid Access, which has providers operating under shield laws in eight states who prescribe and send abortion pills to women across the country, said that in the first 24 hours after the election, the service received nearly 10,000 requests.
While not every request results in a prescription — some women don’t meet the medical criteria or don’t complete the request process — the numbers represented an astronomical surge over the roughly 600 daily requests before the election, Dr. Gomperts said. In the days since, the number of requests has remained greater than usual, although not as high as the first day. “Now, I think it’s around 1,500 or so” per day, Dr. Gomperts said.
Ms. Ryan, who ordered emergency contraception for her daughter, said she had found herself recalling her experience trying to get a birth control prescription filled at a pharmacy at age 18. She said the pharmacist, “this old white man, told me that I shouldn’t be on birth control because it was a sin and against his religion and I needed to get married.”
She said she worries that kind of attitude toward reproductive health could become prevalent again now, and in the wake of the election results, “I don’t feel like it’s that far-fetched.”
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