Online searches for “birth control” skyrocketed after the Nov. 5 presidential election — along with related terms about potential bans for the medication.
At 4 a.m. on Nov. 6 — right around when news broke that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump defeated the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris — Google searches for “birth control” more than doubled, according to Google Trends.
The states where the term was searched the most were all ones that Trump won: West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Arkansas and Indiana.
Those states have instituted near-total bans or restrictions on abortions.
Related searches include variations of the phrase “Is birth control being banned,” along with “Is Trump going to get rid of birth control,” per Google Trends.
During his first term in office, Trump rolled back a previous requirement that employers include birth control coverage in their health insurance plans without a co-pay. The 2017 decision, the administration said, was to protect religious freedom and moral sensibilities as birth control promotes “risky sexual behavior.”
The nonprofit organization A Step Ahead Chattanooga, which provides contraception to Southeast Tennessee, Northwest Georgia and Northeast Alabama, shared on Instagram that requests for birth control were up 287% following the election.
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After the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was handed down in 2022, multiple states enacted “trigger bans” that severely limited — or outright banned — access to abortion.
During this year’s election, voters in some states approved measures to permanently enshrine abortion access into the state’s constitutions.
In September, Trump, 78, said that women “will no longer be thinking about abortion” if he won the election “because it is now where it always had to be, with the States, and a vote of the people.”
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