Starting in November of 2024, McKenzie Rieder, a pediatric nurse practitioner for Mountain Family Health Centers in Glenwood Springs, noticed a trend: more young women were asking for long-acting reversible birth control — typically IUDs or small hormonal implants.
Not only that, but more women wanted new IUDs or implants in place before they were due for replacements.
Nexplanon is a small implant inserted into the skin of the upper arm that releases the hormone progestin to prevent pregnancy. It lasts for up to three years.
“Women were coming in and saying after a year of having their Nexplanon in place that they wanted to replace it sooner, because they wanted to have more longevity in that contraceptive choice,” said Rieder, because “it would give them an extra year and they just didn't know what the political climate was going to look like.”
Across the country, medical providers are reporting a similar trend in the wake of the second Trump Administration. According to the Associated Press, requests for long-term birth control and permanent sterilizations have surged across the U.S since the 2024 election.
Companies that sell emergency contraception and abortion pills say they’re also seeing significant spikes in requests from people who are stockpiling those medications.
Though President Trump has written on his social media platform, Truth Social, that he “has never and will never advocate imposing restrictions on birth control,” Rieder said many women are feeling otherwise.
In the years since the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion in the U.S., 19 states have banned or severely limited the procedure, and anti-abortion advocates have spearheaded efforts to restrict abortion pills — even in states where abortion is legal.
More recently, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration has targeted the federal office overseeing the Title X program, which provides contraception for millions of low-income women.
That increasingly hostile political climate towards reproductive rights has an impact, said Rieder. Typically, when women come to her clinic for birth control, she walks them through various options, outlining their pros and cons, and asking women about their priorities (for instance, whether they want hormonal or non-hormonal birth control, or whether they want a daily pill or something they don’t have to think about every day, like an IUD or implant).
But Rieder noticed conversations around birth control have shifted, “from being more about personal choice to, ‘Now I'm worried about whether or not I can access that birth control in the future.’”
A 2024 study published by two economists, Kate Pennington and Joanna Venator, of the U.S. Census Bureau and Boston College, respectively, shows that any perceived threat to reproductive health influences women’s contraceptive choices.
Restrictive policies, they found, “cause women to make defensive investments in more effective contraception, shifting them away from their preferred methods.”
According to the study, patients who switched to long-acting, reversible contraception increased by an average of 24.3% in the six months after the 2016 presidential election compared to the six months before.
That worries Rieder, noting that she’s spoken with another medical provider in the Roaring Fork Valley who noticed the same trend.
“When politics influences a person's decision to either get birth control or not get birth control,” said Rieder. “It's certainly concerning.”
