Healthcare providers have reported an ‘unprecedented demand’ for abortion pills and hormone drugs after Donald Trump‘s election win, it has emerged.
Women’s and transgender health providers are being inundated with requests from patients who fear their access to certain medications will be banned under a Trump Administration, The Guardian reported.
One telehealth service reported a 300 per cent increase in requests for emergency contraceptives, while another said requests for birth control treatments doubled.
Aid Access, America’s largest supplier of abortion pills, reported a surge in requests that was ‘even larger than the day after Roe v Wade fell’.
Trump downplayed abortion as a second-term priority while on the campaign trail, despite taking credit for the Supreme Court ending a woman’s federal right to terminate a pregnancy and returning abortion regulation to state governments.
The president-elect claimed that overturning Roe v. Wade was enough on the federal level and said last month on his social media platform Truth Social that he would veto a federal abortion ban if legislation reached his desk.
Aid Access ships roughly 9,000 abortion pills a month, according to the newspaper, but after Trump’s election victory was announced received more than 5,000 requests in under 12 hours.
Abortion pill finder website Plan C reported a 625 per cent increase in traffic which co-founder Elisa Wells described as people ‘trying to plan for the reproductive apocalypse that we anticipate will be happening under a Trump presidency’.
But the panic was not exclusive to abortion pills. Requests for emergency contraceptive products, such as Plan B, also skyrocketed.
Telehealth provider Wisp by 11.30am Wednesday had tripled its daily sales of emergency contraception.
The women’s health service also orders of bulk Plan B packs rise from about 30 per cent in early November to 90 per cent on Wednesday. Wisp also claims that new patient requests for Plan B rose from 50 to 70 per cent.
Winx, another women’s health site, told the Guardian it had sold six times the amount of Plan B pills by Wednesday afternoon than it had in the past week combined.
Hey Jane, another telehealth provided, said its requests for birth control doubled.
Trans patients have also expressed concern over access to healthcare, said Dr Crystal Beal, who runs the QueerDoc website which provides patients with estrogen, testosterone and hormone-blocking drugs.
She claimed an influx of patients have asked questions like ‘how can I safeguard my access to medication?’, ‘Should I change [the gender on] my legal documents back so I’m safer?’ and ‘Should I stop taking medication so I’m safer?’
‘I have to tell people I ultimately can’t predict the future or make that choice or decision for them, and I certainly can’t give legal advice,’ Beal told the newspaper.
‘But changing your documentation or stopping your medication does not make you any less of a man or a woman, or any less trans. Who we are is not designated by what our documents say or what medications we take.’
She added that QueerDoc has advised patients to stockpile as much of their hormone treatment that state law and their health insurance coverage will allow.
The company has also suggested that trans men reuse single-use vials of testosterone to stretch them further.
Abortion rights advocates fear a Republican-controlled Congress could enact sweeping national restrictions or an outright abortion ban.
Trump has said he would veto a national ban, despite previously declining to answer questions about it.
But Republicans have been accused of attempting to recast federal abortion restrictions as “minimum national standards” in order to distort their own stances on the issue.
It is also unclear if Trump’s administration would aggressively defend against legal challenges seeking to restrict access to abortion pills, including mifepristone, as the Biden administration has.
Anti-abortion advocates continue to wage legal battles over the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the drug as well as the agency’s relaxed prescribing restrictions.
Trump is also unlikely to enforce Joe Biden’s guidance that hospitals must provide abortions for women who are in medical emergencies, even in states with bans.
