The U.S. saw a dramatic increase in demand for reproductive health medications following the reelection of Donald Trump last week, with many Americans seeking to stockpile reproductive health medications in fear that the new administration may restrict access to emergency contraception and abortion pills across the country.
“Prior to the election results coming out, earlier this month, we had 4,500 visitors per day. [On November 6] we had 82,900 visitors. It’s a huge surge in people looking for information about how to access abortion,” Elisa Wells, co-founder of Plan C, a non-profit that provides abortion medication by mail, told Global News last week. According to The Guardian, Plan C experienced a 625 percent surge in traffic after Trump’s victory was announced.
“We also know from talking to providers that they have seen a huge surge in requests for abortion pills,” Wells told Global News.
The telehealth service Wisp saw a 300 percent spike in requests for emergency contraception following the announcement of Trump’s win, according to The Guardian. There was also a significant rise in bulk Plan B orders, which jumped from about 30 percent of emergency contraceptive orders earlier in the month to nearly 90 percent on Wednesday. The telehealth site Hey Jane also reported that requests for birth control had doubled after the election, while Winx, another women’s health service, said it had sold six times as many doses of Plan B by Wednesday afternoon as it had in the entire previous week.
Another organization, Aid Access, which is the number one supplier of abortion pills by mail in the United States, also reported a sharp spike in sales. In fact, when Trump’s election win was announced, the website saw more than 5,000 requests for abortion pills in just 12 hours — an increase even larger than the surge following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
“I can see all the new requests ticking in as we’re talking,” Rebecca Gomperts, the founder of Aid Access, told The Guardian after the election. “We’ve never seen this before.”
While Trump has wavered on the idea of a national abortion ban, Project 2025 — the conservative blueprint for the next Trump administration — proposes using various government agencies to restrict access to abortion, which includes the possibility of a nationwide ban on abortion pills. A federal ban would even impact states that currently protect abortion rights.
“The plan’s far-reaching recommendations would severely limit reproductive autonomy and access to reproductive health care, while turning back the clock on hard-won gains, both domestically and globally,” the Center for Reproductive Rights said in an October fact sheet.
In addition to stockpiling abortion pills and emergency contraceptives, many Americans also seem to be considering permanent contraception options. In fact, on November 6, searches for “vasectomy” surged, with the highest number of searches coming from states that restrict abortion including Utah, Alaska, Indiana, Nebraska and Kentucky. There was also a notable increase in searches for “bilateral salpingectomy,” a surgical procedure that removes both fallopian tubes, and other search terms, including “sterilization for women,” “cost of vasectomy,” “tubes tied” and “abortion pill shelf life.”
“Clearly, people are trying to plan for the reproductive apocalypse that we anticipate will be happening under a Trump presidency,” Wells told The Guardian.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.