Demand for emergency contraception and medication abortions has spiked since the Supreme Court ruled that there is no constitutional right to an abortion, and now, retailers are rationing sales of the morning-after pill as people preemptively stock up.
Women have begun purchasing Plan B One-Step in high quantities to stock up in the event that they or other women they know, particularly those in abortion-hostile states, need it. The pill has a long shelf life, about four years, similar to that of Tylenol and Advil. Plan B, also known as the morning-after pill, prevents or delays ovulation, or the release of an egg. It may also prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus when taken within a few days of unprotected sex.
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Online inquiries about Plan B skyrocketed in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday. Google searches about the morning-after pill hit peak popularity on Friday, reaching the 100-point mark using Google’s tracking standards. By comparison, the level of interest online was at an 11 on Thursday. The term “morning-after pill” also hit peak popularity on Friday, as did “emergency contraceptive pill.”
Major retailers have begun rationing supplies of the morning-after pill. The most widely used pill is Plan B, but retailers such as CVS and Amazon sell less expensive alternatives, such as Aftera and My Choice. Rite Aid and Amazon are now limiting the number of Plan B pill packs a person can purchase per transaction to three, both online and in stores. Walgreens.com was out of stock completely on Tuesday.
In-stock rates online have fluctuated over the past few days. CVS.com had placed a three-pack limit on Plan B per transaction on Monday, but the purchasing limit went up to 99 on Tuesday. CVS acknowledged that rationing was necessary at least temporarily, even though stores have “ample supply” of Plan B and Aftera.
“Immediately following the Supreme Court decision, we saw a sharp increase in the sale of emergency contraceptives and implemented a temporary purchase limit to ensure equitable access,” said Kara Page, manager of corporate communications at CVS. “Sales have since returned to normal and we’re in the process of removing the purchase limit, which will take effect in-store and on CVS.com over the next 24 hours.”
Scooping up available supplies will hamper some women’s ability to access the pills in an emergency situation. This type of panic buying was most evident in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when grocery store shelves were picked clean and toilet paper became scarce.
The majority Supreme Court opinion Friday authored by Justice Samuel Alito steered clear of the issue of contraceptives, the legal right to which was established in the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut. But Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion sparked fear among abortion rights activists. In his opinion, Thomas said that if the legal underpinnings for Roe v. Wade were wrong, the legal underpinnings of other rights, including the right to procure contraception, could be wrong too.
“For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas said.
The morning-after pill is frequently confused with the medication regimen that induces an abortion. Medication abortions are the most common types of abortions performed in the United States and have been found by the Food and Drug Administration to be safe and highly effective when taken within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. The first drug in the medication course, mifepristone, blocks the hormone progesterone, without which the pregnancy cannot continue in the uterus. Between 24 and 48 hours later, the patient takes misoprostol, which causes cramping and bleeding to empty the uterus. Mifepristone has a shelf life of about five years, while misoprostol is good for about two.
Medication abortion, first approved by the FDA in 2000, requires a prescription from a certified healthcare provider. The FDA has made it easier for women to get prescribed the medication through telehealth services and receive it in the mail, though delivery of the pills in red states has been severely restricted. Women seeking a medication abortion must do so in a state where abortion is legal, such as Colorado, and pick it up at an address in that state before they can return to their home state, such as Texas, and take the pills in private.
The issue of legal dispensation of the medication in states with abortion bans in place remains in question. The Biden administration argues that approval by the FDA, the federal agency charged with protecting public health by ensuring the safety, efficacy, and security of medications, overrides states’ efforts to overrule its stamp of approval and outlaw the pills.
“We will also work with the attorney general and the Department of Justice as they work to ensure that states may not ban medication abortion based on a disagreement with the FDA expert judgment about the drug’s safety and efficacy,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said on Tuesday.
Anti-abortion groups who oppose access to mail-order abortion pills argue that women who experience rare but severe adverse effects, such as excessive bleeding, are more likely to die due to a lack of a physician overseeing the process. Roughly 1,900 severe health reactions to the pills were recorded from September 2000 to February 2019, 529 of which were life-threatening, according to a 2021 report conducted by anti-abortion obstetricians and experts at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of the Susan B. Anthony List.
The company Hey Jane, which offers telehealth appointments with healthcare providers who can then prescribe the pills and send them through the mail, operates in California, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, New York, and Washington state. Its site saw traffic spike 10 times above normal following the court’s decision on Friday, CEO Kiki Freedman said.
But traffic on the site had already been ramping up over the past few months, Freedman said, “because of longer-than-expected appointment wait times, which suggests to us that bans in places like Texas were already having a ripple effect in states with abortion access.” killing
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Women are also turning to the FDA-approved abortion drugs produced and shipped from overseas through the organization Aid Access, though the legal situation is murky and potentially risky. Aid Access maintains that it will continue to mail out abortion-inducing medication to women in all U.S. states, including those that have banned the procedure.
