February 4, 2019

After Trump’s Election, There Was a Big Spike in Long-Term Birth Control Use

It turns out that Donald Trump’s election was good for business after all. Some businesses, anyway. A team of researchers reports that after Election Day lots of women suddenly decided they wanted long-acting birth control:

In 2015, the mean adjusted daily LARC [long-acting reversible contraception] insertion rate during the 30 business days before and inclusive of November 8 was 12.9 per 100 000 women vs 13.7 per 100 000 women during the subsequent 30 business days. The comparable mean adjusted daily LARC insertion rates before and after the 2016 presidential election were 13.4 per 100 000 women and 16.3 per 100 000 women, an increase of 21.6%.

The big question, of course, is why this happened. There are several possibilities:

  • Many women decided they didn’t want to raise children in a country that could elect Donald Trump president.
  • Women were afraid of a Handmaid’s Tale hellscape coming and wanted to prepare.
  • Women were afraid Trump would kill off Obamacare, so they wanted to get their LARC inserted for free while they could.

Any other guesses?

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If you’re reading this, a fundraising pitch at the bottom of an article, you must find our team’s reporting valuable and we hope you’ll consider supporting it with a donation of any amount right now if you can.

It’s really that simple. But if you’d like to read a bit more, our membership lead, Brian Hiatt, has a post for you highlighting some of our newsroom's impressive, impactful work of late—including two big investigations in just one day and covering voting rights the way it needs to be done—that we hope you’ll agree is worth supporting.

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