Thursday, November 14, 2024

Women are stocking up on abortion pills

Kelsey Butler is a reporter for Bloomberg News' Equality team. She covers topics ranging from abortion, child care and workplace policies to

Kelsey Butler is a reporter for Bloomberg News' Equality team. She covers topics ranging from abortion, child care and workplace policies to Black wealth and the economy. You can subscribe here, and share feedback here.

Hello, and welcome back to the Equality newsletter. I'm Kelsey Butler, filling in for Claire Suddath. I'm here to talk about the medication women are stockpiling after the election. 

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Stocking up

Scrolling social media in the wee hours after Donald Trump's resounding win last week, my social media feeds were filled with women talking about how they planned to buy up abortion pills, emergency contraception or book appointments to get long-acting birth control.

Those plans are more than just talk — they're translating to a real surge in search traffic and sales.

Emergency contraception brand Julie — which said last year that it expected to control 10% of the market — saw Amazon orders of its pill "pretty much explode" last week, according to co-founder Amanda E/J Morrison. At some retail locations — by far where most people buy emergency contraception — sales doubled week-over-week. Winx Health says in the 24 hours following the election it sold seven times the number of morning after pills than it had in the week prior. And on Nov. 6 alone, emergency contraception company Cadence OTC saw five times the number of orders it usually gets in the span of a week on its direct to consumer site.

It's not just people seeking the morning after pill, which mostly works by preventing pregnancy by delaying or stopping ovulation. People are also looking to stock up on abortion pills.

Charley, a chatbot that helps people find abortion services, saw more than double the number of users on Nov. 6 compared with a recent typical day. And Plan C, a nonprofit hub for medication abortion resources (which can be used to end pregnancies early on), saw traffic to its website surge 18 times its typical amount on Nov. 6. (The 82,200 people who flocked to the site after Election Day was still far below the 238,000 seen in June 2022 just after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a ruling that did away with federal abortion protections. Plan C had 1.8 million total visitors to its site last year.)

"There really is this understandable fear," said primary care physician Joi Spaulding, who serves as the director of reproductive health justice at Duke Family Medicine & Community Health. "I'm trying to prevent the pregnancy from happening, but if for some reason if I was to get pregnant and didn't want to be, the options for continuing that pregnancy look very different now." 

In recent days, more patients have been asking Spaulding, also an abortion provider at Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, about IUDs, a type of long-acting birth control. In North Carolina, where's she's based, abortion has been banned after the 12-week mark since last year.

In a Truth Social post in May, Trump said he will "never advocate imposing restrictions on birth control, or other contraceptives" and more recently has vowed to veto any national abortion ban.

But the Republican president-elect has taken credit for the overturning of Roe, having appointed the three Supreme Court justices who created a majority for the decision. And in Project 2025 — a conservative playbook co-written or endorsed by more than a dozen former members of Trump's first administration — there are many plans for chipping away at reproductive health care. To name a couple, the document suggests the government should use the Comstock Act to make it illegal to mail abortion medication, and proposes removing emergency contraception from the list of preventive services insurers must cover under the Affordable Care Act. Trump has distanced himself from the document.

Even if none of that comes to fruition, there's another Trump proposal that could put pressure on patients: tariffs. The incoming president has promised to slap a 10-20% levy on imports from other countries, though there's a lot to be fleshed out.

Julie, for example, imports its pills and some of its other materials from overseas, and is thinking ahead about making its packaging cheaper and stockpiling more of its product stateside. The company, which sells its morning after pill for about $40, is considering how much it can absorb before it would be forced to pass along cost increases to vulnerable consumers.

"It's a real concern," Morrison said.

By the numbers

$17.9 trillion
The level of US household debt in the last quarter, a new record.

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