Decolonize Your Birth Control:

You have been feeling like something is off about your birth control options, yes?

This quick essay will help you process the feelings you have been having about your birth control and the options we’ve been given so that you can make informed choices that actually align with your health and your values, and to stop outsourcing the most intimate decisions of your life to a system that was never designed for you.

What is happening right now in women's health is an awakening.

More and more women are choosing to live heathier lives by returning to what’s natural. We’re reading labels, questioning pharmaceuticals, choosing root cause over symptom management in every other area of our lives - and are beginning to wonder why birth control is the one exception. Wondering why that conversation was always met with a prescription or fear mongering.

This is a problem, yes, and it has existed for a long time. So why bring it up now?

Because the stakes have reached a threshold. The global minority - the same architects of colonial medicine who decided which bodies were worth studying, which women were worth protecting, and which populations needed to be managed - have been designing and distributing birth control for over sixty years. And the damage to women's health, freedom, and embodied knowledge is no longer something that can be easily ignored.

This means that the majority of gynecological offices, medical schools, sex education curricula, pharmaceutical marketing departments, and "women's health" programs positioned to help us understand and manage our reproductive lives are: at best, not designed by people who understand or prioritize a woman's long-term wellbeing, and at worst, built to ensure we remain dependent, uninformed, and profitable to the system that created the gap in the first place.

I am writing this piece because women deserve the full picture. The hormonal birth control options we have been given are not the gold standard for our bodies or our health, and something far older and more intelligent than a pharmaceutical patent has been waiting patiently for us to wake up and come back to it.

And guess what? The companies that have marketed these birth control options as safe, empowering, and medically sophisticated are not all they are presented to be. In fact, they have been doing measurable, documented damage to women's hormones, sexual health, emotional wellbeing, and sovereignty - all while simultaneously profiting from the treatments that address the very symptoms they created. The colonizer's model, perfected.

The key is understanding how colonization led to your reproductive choices, why your doctor doesn’t know the alternative exists, and what it looks like when you take your body and power back.

You may be wondering two things before you read any further.

1. What is this piece?

Three reality checks that reveal who built the birth control system and why, what it has cost women's health and sovereignty, and what becomes possible when we take our power back.

2. Who is this for?

This is for women who left hormonal birth control - or never started it- but still somehow feel like they are just winging it. For women who question pharmaceuticals in every other area of life, read ingredient labels, and are doing their best to live healthy, yet still cant enjoy sex without fear of unplanned pregnancy. Women who need to know that what they’re looking for actually exists, that it works, and that they don’t have to figure it out alone

It’s also for women who have been on the hormonal birth control roller coaster for years and can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t quite right - a mood that arrived with the prescription and never quite left, a libido that has disappeared, a symptom her doctor dismissed and gaslit her about that this time she is not willing to let go. She is standing at a threshold she did not know was there, and is beginning to understand that her instincts were right all along.