When the presidential election results were handed down on Wednesday, Rebecca Gomperts, the founder of Aid Access, the No 1 supplier of abortion pills by mail in the United States, was huddled in a Paris apartment with her team of eight American physicians and 15 support staff.
The group – which usually operates remotely, shipping out more than 9,000 abortion pills a month – had convened in person before the election, knowing they might have to spring into action.
They were right: as news of Trump’s victory spread, the website received more than 5,000 requests for abortion pills in less than 12 hours – a surge even larger than the day after Roe v Wade fell.
“I can see all the new requests ticking in as we’re talking,” Gomperts said in a phone call on Wednesday afternoon. “We’ve never seen this before.”
The scenario repeated itself across the country as news of Trump’s victory broke, with women’s and trans health providers getting inundated with requests for services that their patients feared might be banned in a Trump administration.
The telehealth service Wisp saw a 300% increase in requests for emergency contraception; the abortion pill finder site Plan C saw a 625% increase in traffic.
“Clearly, people are trying to plan for the reproductive apocalypse that we anticipate will be happening under a Trump presidency,” said Elisa Wells, the co-founder of Plan C.
For Gomperts and her team at Aid Access, the moment did not come as a shock: they’d been preparing for it since the last Trump administration, when Gomperts, a Dutch physician, expanded her international abortion pill service into the United States.
Since then, Aid Access has devised a system in which physicians in states where abortion is legal prescribe and ship abortion pills to patients in states where it is not. The non-profit eventually expanded to the team of eight physicians in four states, along with a help desk that is available 24/7.
But the scale of the demand on Wednesday – five times more than a usual day – was shocking even to them.
“We have an extremely streamlined process and we are capable of dealing with all the requests really fast,” Gomperts said. “But it’s much more [than usual]. And I think the reason is people are now much more aware – people are aware of the possibility of the abortion pill and aware of the threat it will be taken off the market.”
Trump has flip-flopped on the prospect of a national abortion ban, at one point saying women who obtain abortions illegally should be punished, and at others saying the decision should be left up to the states.
But his supreme court appointments paved the way for the overturning of Roe in 2022, and his appointments to other, lower courts have held up even the strictest of abortion bans in red states like Texas. There are also multiple ways he could go after the prescribing and shipping of abortion pills, which now account for the majority of abortions in the US.
