advertisement

Third-party seller prices of levonorgestrel tablets, the emergency morning-after contraceptive, are rising as people stockpile.

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

[Photo: Nora Savosnick/Bloomberg via Getty Images]

BY Chris Stokel-Walker2 minute read

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.

PluggedIn Newsletter logo
Sign up for our weekly tech digest.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Privacy Policy

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Stokel-Walker is a contributing writer at Fast Company who focuses on the tech sector and its impact on our daily lives—online and offline. He has explored how the WordPress drama has implications for the wider web, how AI web crawlers are pushing sites offline, as well as stories about ordinary people doing incredible things, such as the German teen who set up a MySpace clone with more than a million users. More


Explore Topics