Demand for abortion pills skyrockets in US as women stockpile after Donald Trump's election

Several reproductive-health organizations and companies said that the demand for emergency contraceptives has increased since the election

One of the largest suppliers of abortion pills in the United States, Aid Access, recorded 10,000 requests for the medication within 24 hours of Donald Trump's election as president, reported The Washington Post.

Abortion access was one of the key ballot measures during the US presidential elections(AP)

The number of requests is unprecedented, roughly 17 times what the organisation receives a day. The increase in number of requests for abortion pills points towards stockpiling due to fear of lack of access to abortion, which was one of the key measures on which people voted this election.

Just the Pill, another nonprofit that prescribes abortion medication through telephones, said 22 of its 125 orders from Wednesday through Friday were from people who are not pregnant.

The group's interim executive director, Julie Amaon, told The Washington Post that such advance orders are a “rarity”.

Plan C, an awareness platform that gives information about access to abortion medication has also reported receiving 82,200 visitors to its website on Wednesday, compared with approximately 4,000 or 4,500 visitors per day leading up to the election.

Several reproductive-health organizations and companies said that the demand for emergency contraceptives or “morning after” pills and long-lasting birth control, like intrauterine devices and vasectomies, has increased, though they did not provide any data to support the claim.

“People understand that the threat is very real and the threat is dire to abortion access under a Trump administration,” said Brittany Fonteno, president of the National Abortion Federation.

While Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump’s transition team, said that President Trump believed in states making their own decisions regarding abortion access, he has also called himself “the most pro-life president in history” earlier.

Anti-abortion doctors in the country have launched a lawsuit to limit access to mifepristone, one of two drugs taken at a set interval to induce abortion.

Stockpiling on abortion medication is not a recent phenomenon. In a research paper published by JAMA Internal Medicine in January, number of requests for abortion medicine had increased from non-pregnant people to Aid Access, nearly ten times over after a leak of an anti-abortion legislation in May 2022.

Since Trump's first term as President in 2016, women with private health insurance have increasingly sought out long-acting reversible contraceptive methods like IUDs as well.

Rebecca Gomperts, founder of Aid Access, said that their website crashed after the results were annnounced on Wednesday due to a record-high of requests, from non pregnant people. These orders, she said, were not only from people in states where abortions were illegal but states where abortion was permitted as well.

“People don’t trust anymore that the laws in the states will protect them,” Gomperts said.