After Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022, the need of free and accessible contraception has been a near-constant speaking level.

However the price of contraception within the US is greater than you may assume. Certainly, contraception accounted for 30-44 p.c of out-of-pocket healthcare prices for girls earlier than it was coated by the ACA, based on Deliberate Parenthood.

And now that Donald Trump has received the 2024 presidential election, nothing is definite on the subject of healthcare.

If the ACA — in any other case referred to as Obamacare — was overturned, over 62.4 million ladies would discover themselves with out entry to no-cost contraception, based on the Nationwide Girls’s Legislation Middle (NWLC); and 48 million ladies would lose entry to free emergency contraception.

On the Trump-Harris debate in Pittsburgh in September, Trump admitted that he had the “ideas of a plan” for healthcare coverage to interchange the ACA, however nothing concrete.

Earlier in Could, Trump mentioned he was “taking a look at” coverage to limit contraception entry in some states, earlier than backpedaling on Fact Social.

He tried to calm the waters earlier than Election Day and posted on social media platform X. “Lyin’ Kamala is giving a Information Convention now, saying that I need to finish the Reasonably priced Care Act,” he mentioned. “I by no means talked about doing that, by no means even considered such a factor.”

There are considerations that, whereas Trump has distanced himself from it, Undertaking 2025 — the 900-page coverage doc from former Trump aides and a right-wing assume tank — means that the emergency contraceptive (morning after) tablet is a “potential abortifacient” and shouldn’t be thought of contraception underneath the ACA.

The appropriate-wing blueprint additionally recommends that the Well being Sources and Companies Administration (HRSA) ought to get rid of protection of emergency contraception altogether underneath its preventive tips.

With an specific anti-abortion agenda all through the proposals, Undertaking 2025 additionally means that the Division of Well being and Human Companies (HHS) ought to “[r]eturn to being referred to as the Division of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is well being care and by restoring its mission assertion underneath the Strategic Plan and elsewhere to incorporate furthering the well being and well-being of all People ‘from conception to pure demise.’”

The slide from abortion bans to contraceptive restrictions is way from over. The Heritage Basis — the right-wing assume tank that authored Undertaking 2025 — seems to face in opposition to all leisure intercourse.

A video posted on their X (Twitter) account asserts that eradicating the “mindless use of contraception tablets” would “[return] the consequentiality to intercourse”.

As president, Trump diminished entry to contraception for lower-income individuals by reducing funding for the Teen Being pregnant Prevention Program and bringing in restrictions on the Title X program.

He additionally efficiently weakened ladies’s capability to obtain free contraception underneath the ACA. In 2020, the Supreme Courtroom accepted exemptions which might permit employers to disclaim protection for contraception for spiritual or ethical objections.

Regardless of this, Trump mentioned on his social media platform Fact Social in Could that he would “by no means, ever advocate imposing restrictions on contraception.”

Final yr, JD Vance mentioned on CNN that he doesn’t know “any Republican, a minimum of not a Republican with a mind, that’s attempting to take [birth control] rights away from individuals.”

Nonetheless, 195 Republicans voted agains the Proper to Contraception Act in 2022, which might have acknowledged the authorized proper to voluntary contraception.

Earlier than their election defeat, DNC Nationwide Press Secretary Emilia Rowland warned that “Trump and Vance [have] limitless energy over our our bodies and futures by tearing away entry to Plan B and contraception and elevating well being care prices.”