The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
Ohio doctors saw an increase in women getting long acting reversible contraception in the weeks following President Donald Trump being elected.
Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio noticed a 30% increase in call volume during the week of the election, most of them about accessing contraception or asking what another Trump presidency means for accessing reproductive health care, said Dr. Bhavik Kumar, chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio. Intrauterine devices can last between three to 12 years, depending on the type, according to Planned Parenthood.
Some of their centers saw a 200% increase in the number of IUD insertions in December compared to November, he said.
“We can never tell exactly why everyone’s coming in, but anecdotally and talking to patients, they’re all expressing some level of fear, uncertainty and bracing themselves for a couple of years of uncertainty given the way that this administration behaved the first time,” Kumar said.
Planned Parenthood reported a 760% increase in people making IUD appointments and a 350% increase in people making birth control implant appointments at their health centers the day after the election compared to Election Day, said Planned Parenthood Spokesperson Priscilla Vazquez.
Dr. Ashley Brant, an Ohio OB-GYN associated with Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights, has seen patients in the last couple weeks that have cited the current political climate as their reason for getting an IUD.
“It’s the desire to use highly effective birth control, coupled with concerns about access to birth control in the future that’s sort of what’s under this urgency or concerns about access to reproductive health care in the future if they had an unintended pregnancy,” she said.
During Trump’s first term in office, he appointed three anti-abortion justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, which paved the way for overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022. 12 states have a total abortion ban, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed more than 500 gynecologists in 2023 and more than half of them reported more patients were asking for contraception — sterilization, IUDs and implants — after the supreme court ruling.
“How many kids you have is both deeply personal, but also influenced by our life circumstances like your financial situation, the stability of your relationships, what you expect your life to be like in one year, five years, 10 years,” Brant said. “With any major change in politics in the U.S., people are likely wondering, what this means for their lives and for their families and making the best decisions that they can with the information that they have.”
Trump was inaugurated Monday and the government website reproductiverights.gov dedicated to providing information on reproductive health care is now no longer accessible.
“(Sexual and reproductive health care) has been unfairly targeted and marginalized when it comes to the Trump administration, and is a potential target, and so people … are panicked and uncertain and trying to make quick decisions about what’s best for them given the amount of uncertainty that’s coming their way,” Kumar said.
This recent uptick mirrors an increase in the number of people getting IUDs after Trump’s first election win back in 2016 when the daily rate of long-acting reversible contraceptive insertion was up 21.6% in the month after Trump was elected president in 2016, compared to the 30 days before, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
“It’s triggering for a lot of people, in the sense that for a large swath of our country, their ability to control their body and their life and their futures has been compromised, and they are having to move into action to do what’s best for them,” Kumar said.
