Healthcare professionals have reported an increase in requests for women’s reproductive care, as some women fear what President-elect Donald Trump’s administration might do to women’s healthcare.
In his third run for the presidency, Trump had shifted his thoughts on abortion rights, calling it a state’s rights issue and saying he would veto a national abortion ban. Still, Trump repeatedly highlighted his role in the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 ending the federal right to an abortion, which some Democrats have used to justify their claims that he is a threat to women’s healthcare.
The idea said repeatedly on the campaign trail that Republicans will use their majority, and now anticipated trifecta, to limit contraception for at least the next two years has prompted many people to be fearful about access.
“We are seeing women actually stockpile emergency contraception pills,” Monica Cepak, CEO of the sexual and reproductive telehealth company Wisp, told CNN. “We actually recently launched multipacks of Plan B, and this was the driver of a lot of the increase in orders that we saw. About 90% of emergency contraception orders are those multipacks.”
Wisp offers two types of emergency contraception online and reported that sales of those medications increased by about 1,000% in just one day after last Tuesday’s election. Multipacks of Plan B, or the morning-after pill, made up 92% of all emergency contraception purchased on Wisp during that time.
One day after the election, emergency contraception pill purchases increased by 930% in Texas, 730% in Indiana, and 133% in Oklahoma, according to Wisp data shared with the Hill.
At the startup Winx Health, a sexual and vaginal health company, sales of its morning-after pill Restart went up 315% on the day after the election as compared to the 24 hours before the election.
“Things skyrocketed immediately,” said Cynthia Plotch, co-founder of Winx Health. “We’re seeing the majority of these sales come from our multipack. So it’s not that women are buying a single product. They’re stockpiling to have them on hand for themselves, for their friends, for their sisters.”
Clayton Alfonso, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Duke Health in North Carolina and member of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told CNN that requests for IUD implants and other reproductive care skyrocketed as it did in 2022 after Roe was overturned.
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He said two days after the election he had “four requests from patients for either permanent sterilization or an IUD, and all four of them were saying, ‘Can I please get this done before inauguration?’”
Alfonso said that while this surge occurred two years ago, these requests now seem more “dire.” He said, “We’re seeing these patients, in my mind, rightfully scared as to what is going to happen.”