People are panic buying Plan B after Trump’s win—and Amazon sellers are raising the pills’ price

In the hours after Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election, a number of people took to social media to hammer home a simple directive: Buy Plan B now, before it’s too late.

People are concerned that the new administration will drastically reduce access to reproductive healthcare once Trump returns to the Oval Office, potentially restricting the ability to purchase medications like levonorgestrel (better known as Plan B).

“[The Trump administration] will seek to stop the availability of medication abortion by mail, which has been a lifeline in post-Roe America,” Center for Reproductive Rights CEO Nancy Northup said in a statement. “It will attempt to gag all organizations, including U.S.-based ones, from advocating for abortion law reform or providing abortion care abroad, even with their non-U.S. funds. It will push policies designed to disempower reproductive and human rights organizations while aiding their anti-rights counterparts.”

It’s for that reason that many are making the call to stock up on alternatives, including morning-after pills such as Plan B, which prevent a pregnancy from occurring in the first place. But just as demand has surged for those products, so have prices. While prices haven’t gone up for Amazon’s owned-and-operated products (like its 1.5-milligram levonorgestrel tablets, or its Amazon-branded version of the tablet), some third-party products have seen significant price hikes since last week.

Around election time, a six-pack of My Way levonorgestrel tablets sold under the Lupin brand suddenly jumped in price from around $26 to nearly $40—a 53% increase. The price has since dropped slightly, to around $35, but that’s still 35% higher than it was just a week or so ago. Ohm’s My Choice branded levonorgestrel tablet was sold through Amazon for a flat $15 in the month prior to the election. Once the result was announced, the price rose, and currently sits 25% higher, at $19.99 per tablet. Option 2, a branded alternative to Plan B, has so far remained available from third-party retailers via Amazon for $14.99. Amazon does not set the prices for products sold by third-party sellers on its platform; the sellers do. (Amazon did not respond to Fast Company’s request for comment.)

“I think people really anticipate—rightly, in my view—that there’s going to be significant restrictions on abortion across the U.S. under a second Trump presidency,” says Sydney Calkin, a researcher at Queen Mary University of London and author of Abortion Pills Go Global.

Calkin isn’t surprised to see prices hiked by retailers looking to capitalize on the panic around Trump. The same thing happened two and a half years ago to the price of iodine tablets in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over fears the invasion could escalate into a nuclear conflict. And Calkin is keen not to demonize online pharmacies: “I think actually that what they’re doing is providing a super important service,” she says.

But the fact that Amazon third-party sellers can profit from people’s concerns around controlling their own bodies highlights a broader issue: that America is an outlier in the world when it comes to bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. “There’s a vanishingly small list of countries that are making abortion harder to access, of which the U.S., Poland, and El Salvador are the list,” she says. “So the U.S. is definitely an outlier in the direction of travel.”