What Trump’s Project 2025 Means for Me and My IUD

Like many other people, I woke up on the morning of November 6, 2024, and found out that Donald Trump had been reelected and would be president, again. I had a lot of feelings, but one of my first thoughts was “I have to get my IUD replaced, like, yesterday.”
I’m outspokenly ride or die for my copper intrauterine device (IUD). I got my first one inserted in 2014 during my first semester of law school because I had just found out I was going to be kicked off my parents’ insurance plan. I was panicking and was able to get an appointment the next day, Christmas Eve, at a Planned Parenthood in a state where I didn’t even live. This is like a final boss of logistical birth control access challenges, but getting in the door at a health care provider was easy. On top of that, it cost me zero dollars for over a decade of extremely effective birth control and never wondering “wait am I pregnant?” if my cycle was late.
My first copper IUD was with me, allowing me to enjoy sex without fear of getting pregnant, through a lot of life changes. A major break up, moving states (twice!), traveling around the world, and getting my law degree. As I was lying on the table waiting to get my IUD replaced at another Planned Parenthood the day after the election I, with my law degree and job as a reproductive rights lawyer, thought “wow, a lot of laws have made this insertion legally possible and free, and I don’t know how much longer those laws will exist.” The Affordable Care Act (ACA) really revolutionized birth control access – it requires insurance plans to cover birth control without any out-of-pocket costs to patients. That means when I got my new IUD put in, I knew it would be 100% free for me. It’s easy for me, a white person, to have a good IUD insertion experience. There’s a long history of reproductive coercion for people of color in this country, so I’m careful not to willy-nilly recommend them, but it’s not an understatement to say that I couldn’t have achieved my dreams and lived my life in the way I want without my IUD.
The Trump administration has been very clear in Project 2025 that it plans to strip birth control access for millions of people through policy changes like letting your employer deny you birth control coverage for any reason and getting rid of coverage through the ACA for some birth control methods, like emergency contraception. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear a case that might have implications down the road for the birth control benefit. And Justice Thomas has basically flat out said he wants the extremist majority on the Supreme Court to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut, a foundational case for the legal right to birth control.
Everyone deserves access to the birth control method that works for them, without obstacles, judgment, or misinformation. I would say I’m lucky to have had access to birth control – but it’s not luck, it’s privilege and many, many years of advocacy for birth control access. I’m white, I have sick leave to take time off for my IUD insertion, insurance coverage through my job, access to doctors who won’t give me misinformation, and the ACA got me my IUD for free, both times. It makes me very sad and angry to think that the Trump administration might get rid of the laws and policies that made my free IUD insertion possible. But I take solace knowing the broader movement for reproductive freedom isn’t going anywhere, regardless of who is in office.