Planned Parenthood has recently seen a surge in women requesting long-acting birth control after Donald Trump won the presidential election. According to spokeswoman Tiffany Harms, the number of appointments has increased by 81 percent in Washington and North Idaho.
Planned Parenthood officials report similar increases in requests for long-acting birth control such as intrauterine devices (IUD’s) and hormonal implants. These devices would provide long-term birth control for women, many of whom fear they will lose access to reasonably priced healthcare granted to them by the Affordable Care Act under the Trump presidency.
Trump has been vocal in his opposition of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which confirmed women’s constitutional right to abortion. On November 13, in an interview with “60 Minutes” on CBS, Trump declared that he would appoint conservative Supreme Court Justices in order to reverse the precedent set by Roe v. Wade.
Trump claims that individual states should decide their stance on abortion. Depending on each state’s position, this could force women to travel out of state to receive an abortion. Washington state Democratic Rep. Suzan DelBene stated that “Women’s access to reproductive health care shouldn’t be dependent on their income or their ZIP code. It puts women’s health at risk, and these are also women’s constitutional rights.”
DelBene said that she finds it “unacceptable and extremely concerning” that “President-elect Trump has said he’d punish women for exercising their constitutional rights.”
While the process of overturning a Supreme Court decision is slow-moving, Harms believes that the true danger lies in the potential loss of the Affordable Care Act. Without this legislation, out-of-pocket costs for abortion services or birth control such as an IUD could create “a major barrier” for many women according to Planned Parenthood’s chief medical officer, Raegan McDonald-Mosley.
Both Trump and Paul Ryan, the Republican House Speaker, both seek to cut all funding to Planned Parenthood next year, which will bring reproductive rights to the forefront in Trump’s first hundred days in the Whitehouse.
As proponents of abortion prepare for battle on Capitol Hill, Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence are stacking the presidential cabinet with abortion opponents such as Betsy DeVos for education secretary, South Carolina Republican Gov. Nikki Haley for ambassador to the United Nations, and Ken Blackwell, a former mayor of Cincinnati, who has openly opposed gay rights in addition to reproductive rights.
This month, Trump called upon Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn to Tennessee to join his transition Team. Blackburn has been criticized by Democrats for her leading role in the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, a committee which scrutinizes the practices of abortion providers. The committee recently doubled it’s budget when the House Committee on Administration allowed the panel $800,000 to spend on its investigation.
DelBene, a member of the panel, is also a major detractor of the committee, who argued that its actions are “wasting taxpayer dollars,” and calling it a “witch hunt…with no clear goal of what the reasoning is.”
Despite the controversy over abortion rights in the wake of the election, the overall figures for women receiving abortions has been declining, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The CDC reported that between the years of 2012 and 2013, the amount of women who received abortions decreased by 5%.
