Morning-after pill sales surge online, telehealth companies say, as women prepare for second Trump term

By Jacqueline Howard, CNN

(CNN) — Online sales of emergency contraceptives, like the morning-after pill Plan B, have skyrocketed in the United States in the past week – days after Donald Trump won the US presidential election, according to retailers.

The surge in sales suggests that women are concerned about how a forthcoming Trump administration could restrict their access to emergency contraception, and they are preparing now, said Monica Cepak, CEO of the sexual and reproductive telehealth company Wisp.

At Wisp, which offers two types of emergency contraception online, sales of those medications went up about 1,000% in just one day after Tuesday’s election.

“We are seeing women actually stockpile emergency contraception pills,” Cepak said. “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.”

At startup Winx Health, a sexual and vaginal health company, sales of its morning-after pill Restart were up 315% on the day after the election compared with the 24 hours before the election. That means seven times more doses of Restart were sold on the day after the election than in the entire week prior, according to the company.

“Things skyrocketed immediately,” said Cynthia Plotch, co-founder of Winx Health.

As of Friday, sales of the product had climbed 966% from the three days before the election, she said.

“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,” Plotch said.

“Something that I am taking away from this experience is that women are smart. Women are savvy. We didn’t make our bodies political. They were made to be political pawns, and now we’re learning how to take back that control,” she said. “I think that is why we are seeing the trends that we are seeing.”

Winx Health has also seen increased interest in its community-funded Restart Donation Bank program, which allows anybody who needs access to the Restart morning-after pill to request it online and receive it free.

“We are a women-owned, women-led company that represents a community of women. It is our duty to continue to fight. That’s what’s next for us,” Plotch said. “In a Trump administration, our work – not just at Winx, but our work as a community – is around protecting access and increasing education.”

Emergency contraception, such as the morning-after pill, is a method of birth control that can prevent pregnancy after someone has sex. It’s not the same as abortion, which uses different types of medications. Morning-after pills work only if the user is not already pregnant, whereas abortion is the termination of a pregnancy.

When women live in states with increased regulation around abortion, “they think that they also don’t have access to this product too,” Plotch said of emergency contraception.

Some physicians have reported an increase in patients asking not only about their options for these types of emergency contraception but about long-acting contraception like intrauterine devices, or IUDs. Some of these patients are specifically asking to receive either medications or procedures before Trump is sworn into office in January.

On Thursday, two days after the election, “I 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?’ ” said Dr. Clayton Alfonso, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Duke Health in North Carolina and member of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

“I also had a pediatrician colleague of mine contact me and say, ‘Hey, I have an 18-year-old who is in a panic trying to get an IUD before end of year. Can you help get her in?’” he said. “Sitting in clinic, another colleague of mine said, ‘I’ve already seen two requests for permanent sterilization just since the results Tuesday night into Wednesday morning.’ ”

Alfonso said he and his colleagues saw a slight bump in these types of requests after the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the federal right to abortion in 2022.

But the new requests feel more “dire,” he said. “We’re seeing these patients, in my mind, rightfully scared as to what is going to happen.”

Some of the concerns around what the reproductive health care landscape could look like under a second Trump presidency stem from what has been outlined in Project 2025, a conservative blueprint that was organized by think tank The Heritage Foundation for the next Republican president to consider.

Based on what has been outlined in that agenda, reproductive health care experts are concerned about the ways in which a second Trump presidency could decimate access to not just abortion care but maternal health care, fertility care and contraception.

“What’s important to recognize is that all of those are interrelated,” said Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization focused on sexual and reproductive health that supports abortion rights.

There are concerns that the Trump administration may spread misinformation around reproductive health care, defund programs and clinics that provide contraception or use the Comstock Act, a Reconstruction-era federal law that prohibits the mailing of “obscenities,” to ban the mailing of medication abortion.

“When you attack one piece of reproductive health care, it really has a ripple effect,” Friedrich-Karnik said.

“People who need abortion care often also at some point need contraception, and people who need contraception might eventually need maternal health care,” she said. “People’s lives are fluid like that, and this care is fluid, and you can’t attack one piece of reproductive health care without really impacting the whole range of care that people need.”

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