After 2016 election, long-acting contraceptive use jumped among privately insured women

In the days after the 2016 election, news outlets picked up on an apparent trend: Women, fearing new restrictions on birth control access or changes to the Affordable Care Act, were rushing to get IUDs and other contraceptive implants. Now, a new study backs those anecdotes up with evidence. Researchers looked at data from 3 million women in a commercial health insurance claims database and found that the number of women who received long-acting, reversible contraceptives, or LARCs, jumped in the month after the 2016 election. There were roughly 16.3 LARC insertions per 100,000 women in the study each weekday in the month after the 2016 election, compared to 13.7 each day during that same time frame in 2015.