Demand For IUDs On The Rise After Presidential Election: Study

The demand for IUDs has been on the rise since the last presidential election, according to a study released by health care technology company athenahealth on Tuesday.

An analysis of 1 million patient visits for contraceptive management showed that between October 2016 and January 2017 the demand for IUDs went up by 21 percent compared to the same time period a year earlier.

The IUD demand continues to increase with the ongoing debates in Congress over the Trump administration’s new health care bill. "This is about people's fears about the contraceptive mandate going away," Dr. Eve Espey, chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of New Mexico told athenathealth.

The new GOP health care bill does not address contraceptive coverage but proposes a one-year funding freeze for Planned Parenthood, which provides contraceptive care for more than 2 million women annually.

"We're going to go back pretty quickly to the [way contraception was covered] before ... I don't think it will continue to be recognized as fundamental care,” Espey said.

IUDs offer some advantages over other contraceptive methods. Depending on the patient’s insurance coverage, birth control pills can cost from $160 to $660 a year, whereas the IUDs cost between $500 to $1100 and last multiple years. The Affordable Care Act had helped women spend $1.4 billion less on birth control pills in 2013, according to a study by the Health Report.

Even though IUDs are 20 times more effective than the pill, as of 2015 only 7 percent of U.S. women had preferred the contraceptive method, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Women should not be coerced into choosing a method because they’re afraid that access to birth control is going to be taken away from them,” Susan Berke Fogel, director of reproductive health at the National Health Law Program, told Quartz.

Photo by Sarah Mirk