“We’re only 12 hours away from the election results being released, but the build-up is palpable,” Foster said just before lunch. “It’s amazing.”

While control of the House of Representatives is still undecided and the size of the Republican majority in the Senate remains unclear Wednesday, the exact impact of the election on access to abortion remains unclear. But experts agreed that access to reproductive care in many states was likely to become more difficult. The increase in requests to Foster’s group reflects a new reality: more than a third of those who registered overnight were not even pregnant. They wanted to make sure they had access to mifepristone, an abortion medication, if they ever needed it.

The election yielded mixed results on abortion, with 10 states voting on abortion-related ballot measures. In Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota, voters rejected constitutional amendments that would have overturned state abortion bans passed following the 2022 Supreme Court ruling. But in Missouri, Voters passed a measure to overturn one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bans, and abortion rights amendments in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland and Montana also passed.

Some of the consequences of Tuesday’s political earthquake began to emerge on Wednesday. Under the Trump administration, some New England abortion providers are at risk of losing significant federal funding, experts say. They might need their state governments to cover the deficit, said Katherine L. Kraschel, an assistant professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University and board chair of Planned Parenthood of Southern New England.

The first Trump administration issued new rules that barred organizations sharing space with abortion services from participating in the Title X program, which funds family planning and preventive health services, Kraschel said. Those receiving grants were also prohibited from discussing abortion, which excluded Planned Parenthood from the program. As a result of this policy, millions of people have been unable to access family planning services, she said.

The Biden administration reversed these policies. A second Trump administration will almost certainly reinstate them. Kraschel fears that abortion opponents in Washington will also try to block abortion providers like Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds.

“Abortion providers across the country still rely on the federal government for a significant portion of their funding – just to maintain the non-abortion health services they provide,” she said . “It could be in jeopardy.” She added that New England’s health care providers are already stretched thin.

Trump’s victory also risks shaking up the legal landscape. Last January, the Biden administration implemented new rules allowing certain providers to prescribe mifepristone remotely, eliminating the requirement for an in-person doctor’s visit. This policy paved the way for organizations like MAP to legally ship thousands of packages of abortion pills across state lines.

Abortion opponents have challenged the Food and Drug Administration’s policy change in court, and Biden’s Justice Department has vigorously defended it. Trump could go in the opposite direction and simply reverse his decision, said I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School.

Some abortion opponents have also proposed attacking the legality of mail-order abortion pills by citing the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that prohibits the use of the mail or other public conveyances to distribute abortion. pornographic material, contraceptives and items that can be used to produce abortion pills. an abortion. Whether enforcement of the law would hold up in court remains an open question; it hasn’t been enforced in decades, legal experts say.

The Trump administration could try to make it illegal to ship abortion drugs, and even surgical abortion tools, Cohen said, while adding that invoking the Comstock Act is highly uncertain.

“Team Trump tried to move away from it at certain points during the campaign, but it’s hard to know if that was a general election strategy or if it was a considered point of view,” he said. he declared.

The Trump Justice Department is also likely to take a different position than the Biden administration on whether states that strictly ban abortion must comply with federal laws that require it. emergency abortion care when it is the only treatment capable of saving the life of a pregnant woman or preventing serious harm to her health. In Texas and Idaho, the Biden administration decided to enforce the Emergency Medical Treatment and Work Act.

Both states challenged this law in court. The Supreme Court sent their cases back to lower courts without ruling on the issues; in the Texas case, the court ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing, while in Idaho the majority cited different reasons for not intervening. This leaves open the question of how to reconcile federal and state laws.

“The Supreme Court has basically looked at the issue with the possibility of coming back later,” Cohen said. The Trump administration, he said, will likely stop enforcing the law, withdraw its objections in court and leave the issue to the states, which would make the cases “disappear.”

In Massachusetts, the right to abortion is enshrined in the state constitution, and elected officials make it a point to implement policies that mirror abortion restrictions in the red state. Earlier this year, Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell created a “Reproductive Justice Unit,” charged with monitoring new anti-abortion legislation and tactics emanating from red states and helping coordinate policies to counter them.

At a news conference Wednesday, Gov. Maura Healey noted that Massachusetts has a stockpile of mifepristone, has passed protective laws to protect abortion providers, and highlighted the right to abortion as something something “to which we are also very committed”.

“We will ensure that women and those who need care are protected here in Massachusetts,” she said. “Always, always.”

But on Wednesday, local abortion rights supporters were contemplating the unthinkable: that a Republican-dominated Congress could pass a national abortion ban that would override state policies. Legal experts say it’s unclear whether such a law would be upheld in federal courts.

“I hope it doesn’t happen, of course,” said Dr. Louise P. King, a practicing surgeon with a law degree and director of reproductive bioethics at the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School. Although Trump has said he would not sign an abortion ban if it passes, King and others remain skeptical.

“I have no idea what Trump thinks, because he never really says anything of substance about what he thinks,” King said. “But there are absolutely legislators who have been elected to seats who would love to see this happen and would embrace it.”

Whether this is possible, she added, will become clearer in the coming days as the final election results are known.

Angel Foster and her MAP team will be ready. In anticipation of a possible Trump victory, she purchased several months’ worth of abortion pills in advance, and the monthly “packing parties,” in which volunteers fill envelopes with abortion drugs and additional materials, have become a weekly activity. But if demand continues at the current rate, it will need to restock sooner than expected.

“If what happened in the last few hours continues like this,” she said, “we will need a lot more medicine.”

Documents from Globe Wire Services were used in this report.

Adam Piore can be contacted at [email protected].