(Adnkronos) – After Donald Trump’s election victory, there has been a surge in sales of abortion pills in the United States. American women fear that after his inauguration at the White House on January 20, the president could sign a decree limiting their sale, overturning measures adopted by Joe Biden to defend abortion rights under attack in dozens of Republican-led states.
Aid Access, one of the leading providers of abortion pills, reported receiving 10,000 requests for the drug in the 24 hours following Trump’s victory, at dawn last Wednesday, a number about 17 times higher than the 600 daily requests it receives on average. While Just the Pill, a nonprofit that prescribes the abortion pill through telemedicine visits, said that of the 125 requests received between Wednesday and Friday, 22 were from women who were not pregnant and wanted to “stock up.”
Meanwhile, Plan C, which provides information on accessing the abortion pill, received 82,000 visits to its website last Wednesday, compared to a daily average of 4,000-5,000. “People understand that the threat is very real and that the threat to abortion rights from the Trump administration is terrible,” explains Brittany Fonteno, president of the National Abortion Federation, emphasizing that there is “great, understandable concern about being able to receive the necessary assistance.”
Trump has taken a wavering stance on abortion, on one hand calling himself the “most pro-life president in history” and claiming credit for appointing the three justices who cast the deciding votes in the Supreme Court to overturn the constitutional right to abortion – but on the other hand saying that he will veto a federal law limiting or banning it altogether, modeled on those passed by dozens of Republican-led states following the Court’s ruling, the interruption of pregnancy.
It must also be considered that anti-abortion groups, which often refer to the Christian right that is an important electoral bloc for Trump, have initiated lawsuits to limit access to mifepristone, one of the two drugs used as an abortion pill, claiming that it is unsafe and that the FDA should not have approved it, using arguments refuted by the scientific community.
It should be remembered, however, that the conservative-majority Supreme Court last June unanimously rejected the request to ban the online purchase and receipt of mifepristone by mail. But they did so only as a matter of form, thus opening up the possibility that the issue will be re-presented in another form. It was Biden who in 2023 signed the decree allowing pharmacies to sell mifepristone online and send it by mail.
