A surge of patients in Michigan are considering new contraceptive options following the election, according to physicians in the state.
It’s a rare day that has gone by since the election without a patient inquiring about their birth control options, rural Michigan-based OBGYN Melissa Bayne said. Many of the patients who are calling into her office are already on some form of birth control, but are interested in new, more long term options that will last through President Donald Trump’s second administration.
“And we’ve been getting a lot of requests for sterilizations,” Bayne said. “I did more sterilization requests in the three months post-Dobbs than I had done in probably 15 years.”
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All three of the U.S. Supreme Court Justices Trump appointed in his first term helped overturn the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022 with a ruling in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case. Trump has waffled for years on his stance on abortion, currently advocating for access to be a state-decided issue.
Concerns over further rollbacks on reproductive health care have been common in the hundreds more patients in Michigan who have made appointments for long-acting forms of birth control like IUDs each month since the election, Planned Parenthood of Michigan reports.
In fact, in the two weeks following Election Day, Planned Parenthood of Michigan reports that appointments at Planned Parenthood health centers for long term reversible birth control like IUDs went up 77% compared to the same timeframe the year prior.
And each week since there’s been about 40% more appointments than there were before the election, Chief Advocacy Officer for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan Ashlea Phenicie said.
The election and the current state of affairs in the United States were cited as top concerns for those opting into getting long term birth control, Phenicie said, with some patients concerned that the Trump administration would roll back access to contraception or institute a nationwide abortion ban.
“I think that we’re seeing an increase in appointment requests because folks are concerned about what the state of reproductive health care will look like for the next four years,” Phenicie said. “Long acting, reversible birth control is a great option for a lot of people…IUDs, arm implants, are some of the most effective types of contraception because they have very little user error. [They’re] also long-acting so they can work for multiple years and could cover the second Trump administration.”
Nationally, Planned Parenthood reports that on the day after the election Planned Parenthood health centers saw a 1,200% increase in scheduling for vasectomy appointments scheduled and a 760% increase in scheduled IUD appointments.
Bayne, who serves on the Committee to Protect Health Care Reproductive Freedom Task Force said even in states like Michigan where the right to an abortion and reproductive health care is a part of the state’s constitution, there’s still a lot of fear surrounding unwanted pregnancies or not being able to access life-saving care related to pregnancy.
Even without a federal ban on abortion, Bayne said any changes in Medicare or Medicaid would have widespread impact on the patients she sees. In the rural Michigan community she serves, Bayne said 70% of her patients are covered by Medicaid and Medicare.
The state of access to reproductive health care has put some patients in a tough spot, Bayne said and she hopes knowledge, rather than fear, can be a motivator for health care decisions.
Bayne reflects on one scenario that has given her pause, a 22-year-old with no children coming to her office saying, ‘I absolutely know that I don’t want children, and I absolutely don’t want to be in a situation of having failed contraception or not being able to access contraception’. Knowing that the regret for sterilization procedures decreases with age while balancing respect for a patient’s decision is delicate art.
Though several studies reflect that 30 years old is typically the age where regret for sterilization goes down for women, Bayne notes that it’s not very high to begin with and other surgeries like knee replacements have higher regret rates.
“So balancing that conversation of autonomy and saying to a patient, ‘I absolutely respect your autonomy and you’re an adult, and your ability to make this decision for yourself, and I don’t want you to make this decision out of fear’… those two things coexist in the same conversation,” Bayne said.
What started as an attempt to fight back against stigma around sterilization turned into a national debate when Michigan state Rep. Laurie Pohutsky (D-Livonia) shared at a rally outside the State Capitol that she had undergone surgery to permanently make herself sterile.
Navigating pregnancy in Trump’s America was not an option for her, Pohutsky told the crowd last week, a statement that was highly criticized by many conservative figures including Ben Shapiro who posted on “X” saying “So many broken people” directed at Pohutsky, which has received 1 million views to date.
“We’re…getting some death threats, which was not really what I expected to happen…I find it really, really weird that anyone has personal feelings about what choice I ultimately made about my own body and my procreative future,” Pohutsky said. “There have been very polarized reactions about it, and I think that it’s going to start becoming more common to have conversations around it. That was what I was hoping for, to kind of remove some stigma there.”
The conversations around her decision to end any possibility of getting pregnant were long and not easy conversations to have, Pohutsky said. It’s common for women to second guess themselves and she was glad to hear that in sharing her story, others have reached out to share that they’ve also gone through the process or hearing her story made them feel less alone as they consider sterilization.
Politics and elections have been driving forces in trends in contraception. Like Bayne observed after Roe v. Wade fell in 2022, nationally there was a surge in inquiries for sterilization procedures. After Trump was elected for the first time in 2016, where he ran saying he’d put pro-life justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, usage of long-term birth control increased by more than 20% in the weeks following the election.
Pohutsky was among the masses that got an IUD in response to the 2016 presidential election. Pohutsky shared that regardless of how the 2024 election played out, she was already educating herself on sterilization as a possibility, but Trump’s victory prompted her to set a date to have the procedure while it was still available.
“I think that you can be at peace with a decision that you make, but also sort of mourn the closing of a chapter. That was a definite part of my life that I decided was done with when I went for the surgery,” Pohutsky said. “I think ultimately, I would have ended up having the surgery. That was something that we had sort of settled on, but there was a sense of urgency. The need to do it now, I think, was solely because of how the election went and there is a part of me that resents that anyone has to make a decision based on somebody else’s personal preferences around their body.”
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