Decolonize Your Birth Control:
How the Government Worked its Way into Your Panties, and How to Get ‘em Out
30ish minute read, or click below and I’ll read it to you!
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 with you in mind.
There’s an awakening happening right now in women's health.
More and more women are choosing to live healthier 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 we’re 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. People of 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’m 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, our environment 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’re presented to be. In fact, they’ve 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’s 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’ve left hormonal birth control - or never started it- but still somehow feel like they are just winging it when it comes to their contraceptive choices. 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’ve 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.
What is Womb Literacy (& Why Every Woman Needs It.)
womb literacy /wo͞om lĭt′ər-ə-sē/
noun
The ability to read and understand the language of your own womb.
"She described womb literacy as the missing chapter of every sex ed class she had ever taken."
We live in a society that places profound value on literacy, building entire educational systems around it. We understand that the ability to read and write is not just a skill but a form of access, power, and self-determination. A person who can’t read can’t advocate for themselves in the systems that govern their life.
And yet most women are completely illiterate about their own wombs and sexual health.
Womb literacy is the ability to read and understand the language of the womb. It is the practice of understanding, interpreting, and honoring the cyclical intelligence of the female body as a daily, embodied skill. The more commonly cited term in this field is body literacy but to me, womb literacy feels more precise, more accurate, and more authentic when considering exactly which intelligence has been suppressed, colonized, and reclaimed.
Why does womb literacy matter?
Because you can’t advocate for a womb you don’t understand. Because a woman who understands what her cervical fluid is communicating, what her temperature patterns reveal about her progesterone levels, what her luteal phase length signals about her hormonal health - that woman walks into every medical appointment as someone who already knows what is happening in her body. She is not a passive patient begging to be fixed. She is an informed advocate for her own reproductive health care. She is, to a system built on her compliance, unprofitable - a disruption.
Reality Check #1: It's Not an Accident That You Were Never Taught How Your Body Actually Works
Only 1 to 4 percent of medical professionals receive any formal training in fertility awareness-based methods.
Why Are Women Given Prescriptions Instead of Education?
What most women don’t realize is that the menstrual cycle has been recognized by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists as the "5th vital sign" - as essential a measure of overall health as blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, and temperature. Your cycle’s not a monthly inconvenience, it’s your body's most detailed, real-time report on the health of your brain, bones, thyroid, adrenals, cardiovascular system, metabolism and more. It’s your monthly report card.
And yet most women have no idea it exists or how to read it.
Education was never the model - compliance was. And compliance, as it turns out, is enormously profitable.
So again, we have been conditioned to see our cycles as inconveniences to be managed, to trust a system over our own embodied wisdom, and to believe that we need an expert - that a prescription is simpler - and safer - than what we can do for ourselves.
The proof is in those who are profiting from this ignorance - drug companies themselves, and the medical institutions they have shaped. Their business model, their lobbying patterns, the way they fund continuing medical education and shape prescribing standards - all of this shows exactly what their goal is.
Instead of learning how ovulation works, what cervical fluid communicates, how basal body temperature reflects progesterone output, or how the hormonal symphony that orchestrates ovulation connects virtually every system in the body - we were given a pill that turns the entire system off. The teenage girl who starts birth control at fifteen for acne, for painful periods, for a cycle that has not yet had the chance to stabilize, is not being given healthcare. She’s being given a pharmaceutical override of a body that has not finished developing, without a clear explanation of what is being suppressed or why.
Modern gynecology was built around management not education; suppression and silencing symptoms rather than healing them. Cycles are to be regulated and chemically castrated, not understood. And a medical education system funded and shaped in no small part by pharmaceutical interests produced generations of providers who had, themselves, received almost no training in how to support women in understanding their own fertility.
Getting Rich – By Any Means Necessary
Your Side Effects are Their Business Model
wombliteracy.com
The global contraceptive drugs market was valued at$18.57 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $37.22 billion by 2032.
The dark side of these numbers is that companies driving that growth like Bayer, Pfizer, Merck, Johnson and Johnson, and Abbvie are the same corporations that manufacture the “cures” for the hormonal imbalances that long term contraceptive use can itself create.
From antidepressants, infertility and IVF medications, chemotherapy drugs, and the synthetic hormone replacement therapy for when your body has finally had enough.
One example is Bayer who manufactures Yasmin - a birth control pill the FDA investigated for elevated blood clot risk – and also manufactures (and profits from) Xarelto, one of the anticoagulants prescribed when those clots develop.
Both the field of gynecology and the pharmaceutical industry have a dark and sordid past of exploiting indigenous women and women of color. The “father” of modern gynecology J. Marion Sims took it upon himself to experiment on the bodies of enslaved African women to advance his skill set and the field. The pharmaceutical company that produced the world's first commercially available birth control pill in the 1960s similarly was led by men who chose to experiment on Puerto Rican women without their consent.
Colonization keeps women dis-empowered - the colonizers hold the patents, the profit, and the cultural authority to define what responsible reproductive health looks like. And here is the part that mirrors every colonial story ever told: even as women begin to notice the negative effects, they are still taught to see hormonal birth control as the responsible, modern, gold standard choice. This is the psychological dimension of colonization - it is so thorough that those being colonized often end up defending the very system that was never built to serve them.
“But Chanana, it's so convenient, I don't even have to think about it.”
-People
This is the goal of the system - not your health, or your literacy. It's exploiting your ignorance inside the shell of convenience, and distraction, because a woman who doesn't have to think about it is a woman who wont question it.
My Friends, Meet Colonization…
Colonization is still happening right now, to land, to cultures, to bodies, to ecosystems across the globe. And as I’m apply it here, it is worth naming clearly what colonization actually is and does, and that colonized peoples are dealing with:
The systematic extraction of resources - land, labor, knowledge, cultural wealth - from indigenous people, leaving those communities with less autonomy than they began with.
The deliberate erasure of existing knowledge systems: medicine, agriculture, spiritual practice, language, and the transmission of wisdom between generations - replaced across the board with the colonizer's systems.
Engineered dependency on colonial institutions, making original self-sufficiency progressively harder to access, practice, or even remember.
All of this enacted under the language of "progress," "development," "civilization," or "help" - with the colonizer positioned as the benevolent expert and the colonized as the grateful recipient.
Disproportionate targeting of the most vulnerable and least powerful populations first and hardest.
Profit and power flowing upward to the colonizer while those being colonized remain economically, physically, and politically disempowered.
A psychological dimension so complete that those being colonized often begin to see the colonizer's ways as aspirational - as the gold standard - even as those ways damage them.
So THAT is colonization. It creates horrendous, ugly, vicious cycles -
and many people are still operating under the illusion that it ended with Columbus.
I would argue that the gist of colonization of your birth control is this:
Women's ancient, embodied knowledge of their own fertility was dismissed as ineffective and replaced with surgical sterilization and a pharmaceutical product developed by the colonizers themselves.
That replacement was funded by population control agendas, tested on the most vulnerable women in colonized territories without their knowledge or consent, and sold to the world as liberation.
We have been engineered to depend on a system - and on the prescriptions that sustain it - rather than on our own wisdom or the knowledge our grandmothers carried.
The profit from that dependency flows directly to the same corporations manufacturing the treatments for the very health imbalances that long-term contraceptive use can create.
Women who report side effects have been medically gaslit since the pill's first trials - their observations labeled as being "in their heads," and their symptoms dismissed.
And the psychological colonization runs deep enough that even as women begin to feel the side effects, hormonal birth control is still presented as the responsible, modern, gold-standard choice.
Reality Check #2: How a Known Carcinogen Became a Staple in the Lives of Millions of Women
In 2005, the World Health Organization, through the International Agency for Research on Cancer, classified combined estrogen-progestin oral contraceptives as a Group 1 carcinogens.
That means hormonal birth control has the same risk classification as asbestos, lead, and plutonium.
This does not mean that every woman who takes hormonal birth control will develop cancer. What it means is that the evidence is sufficient to confirm carcinogenicity in humans - that the risk is real, and that women have a right to understand what they’re getting themselves into, but rarely do.
And even setting cancer risk aside, a Group 1 carcinogen is, by definition, not doing anything good for the body. The framing of hormonal birth control as health care - as cycle regulation, as acne treatment, as a hormonal balancer or cycle regulator - depends on a collective willingness to not ask what a synthetic override of the endocrine system is doing to every other system in the interconnected body.
What is Womb Literacy (& Why Every Woman Needs It.)
womb literacy /wo͞om lĭt′ər-ə-sē/
noun
The ability to read and understand the language of your own womb.
"She described womb literacy as the missing chapter of every sex ed class she had ever taken."
We live in a society that places profound value on literacy, building entire educational systems around it. We understand that the ability to read and write is not just a skill but a form of access, power, and self-determination. A person who can’t read can’t advocate for themselves in the systems that govern their life.
And yet most women are completely illiterate about their own wombs and sexual health.
Womb literacy is the ability to read and understand the language of the womb. It is the practice of understanding, interpreting, and honoring the cyclical intelligence of the female body as a daily, embodied skill. The more commonly cited term in this field is body literacy but to me, womb literacy feels more precise, more accurate, and more authentic when considering exactly which intelligence has been suppressed, colonized, and reclaimed.
"But Chanana - alcohol and tobacco are also Group 1 carcinogens, so birth control can’t be that bad!?" -People
I'm glad you brought that up. Do you really think women should be ingesting alcohol or tobacco all day, every day, for their entire reproductive years - from their teens through their forties?
The math is not mathing.
When something carries the same carcinogen classification as plutonium and is routinely prescribed to healthy fifteen-year-olds for acne or heavy periods, we aren’t looking at medicine, we’re looking at a market.
The Dark Origins of Modern Birth Control
Margaret Sanger, whose advocacy was instrumental in the development of the birth control pill and who founded the organization that would become Planned Parenthood, was so explicit in her eugenic positioning that she addressed a Ku Klux Klan women's auxiliary meeting, and co-signed support for the Buck v. Bell Supreme Court decision that authorized the forced sterilization of people deemed genetically "unfit."
In 1922, she wrote that birth control was:
"...nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit."
The system that produced and distributed hormonal birth control at scale was never primarily oriented around women's health or liberation. It was oriented around eugenics and population control.
“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind...”
Engineering a “superior” race
The modern birth control movement has a well documented foundation in eugenics. Eugenics in a nutshell is: to control who reproduces, eliminate "undesirable" traits from the population, and engineer a “superior” human race. That is the stated, published, and indisputable intellectual framework that shaped American reproductive policy for the first half of the twentieth century - and that laid the direct foundation for the birth control industry we have today.
Eugenics originated in Britain, an epicenter of colonialism. It was quickly welcomed by the colonizers of America with open arms, and had been going strong for 2 decades here when Hitler cited American eugenics laws and programs as the model and inspiration for his own. The top targets of the eugenics movement were poor, disabled, mentally ill, indigenous folk (people of color), and immigrants. Anyone whose reproduction was deemed a threat to the social order - which, examined closely, always meant a threat to the economic and political dominance of the colonizers and their descendants.
In 1927 The Supreme Court declared in the case Buck v. Bell that the state may forcibly sterilize its citizens, which governments have been taking full advantage of even till today. Forced sterilization became commonplace throughout colonized populations, from “the Mississippi appendectomy” in the American south to “la operation” in Puerto Rico, women going to government run health centers were having their tubes tied and wombs removed without their knowledge or consent at alarming rates.
According to one such woman Fannie Lou Hamer who went in for a minor surgery only to leave without a uterus: "In the North Sunflower County Hospital, I would say about six out of the ten Negro women that go to the hospital are sterilized with the tubes tied." Teaching hospitals in the South were, as Dorothy Roberts documents in Killing the Black Body, "performing unnecessary hysterectomies on poor Black women as practice for their medical residents."
Should we all just have 10 kids?
When we talk about decolonizing birth control, it’s not to say every woman should have 10+ kids like many of our ancestors. Worldwide, there was no universal consensus among indigenous communities on family size - there have always been women who chose not to have children at all, tribes who kept family sizes small and there have always been those for whom large families were a deeply held value. The key is to say every woman deserves to have the cultural knowledge and choice when it comes to choosing the size of her family, and not have it imposed on her by the institutions of colonization.
In many traditional cultures – including my ancestral Belarusian and African roots - large families have historically been understood as blessings and as the gold standard. When I have asked my elders in Botswana about pre-colonial birth control, they are often stumped. Not because the knowledge was absent, but because the desire to limit family size was not on the radar for the majority of women.
At the same time, many indigenous communities were simultaneously practicing sophisticated fertility regulation and birth control practices. From extended breastfeeding as natural contraception, postpartum abstinence, animal intestine condoms, herbal contraception, and cycle observation and more. The knowledge and tools for child spacing and reproductive sovereignty existed in pre-colonial societies.
What arrived under colonialism and the international population control movement was something completely different.
We see a very clear stance from the colonial regime on philosophy on large families when Margaret Sanger said:
"The most merciful thing that a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it."
History is ripe with evidence of this real time colonization of women’s bodies by the entitled elite. By the time the non-consensual Puerto Rico studies, where white researches began testing the pill on poor, largely uneducated local women in public housing projects, nearly 1 in 5 Puerto Rican women had already been surgically sterilized.
My African grandmother who never focused on birth control because her fertility existed within her own cultural context of large families and abundance, was exercising her sovereignty. A woman of African descent sterilized with the full support of the law, but without her knowledge or consent was not. One is a free woman in relationship with her own life, and the other is under the thumb of colonization.
The Era of “Chop it out” Medicine
The colonization of birth control does not exist in isolation. It is one expression of a broader medical model built around the management and silencing of women's bodies rather than their well being and healing.
Heavy bleeding - suppress it with hormones, painful cramps - override them with the pill. Irregular cycles - standardize them pharmaceutically, ovarian cysts – chop ‘em out. Endometriosis - manage it indefinitely with synthetic hormones that mask the progression of the disease without addressing its root cause. Fibroids – chop out the whole womb.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, roughly 1 in 3 women between the ages of 65-74 will have had a hysterectomy – the removal of her core and power source as a woman. By age 75+ approaching half of all women are living without wombs. That’s more than just medical statistics it’s cultural indictment.
What the "chop it out" approach produces is women who typically require a lifetime of hormone replacement therapy. The surgical removal of the uterus creates pharmaceutical dependency and thus ensures a consistent flow of profits for her remaining lifetime. This extends the cash flow generated for the drug companies from any given women beyond her child bearing years.
There is very little financial incentive to research the herbs that our fore-mothers used to regulate fertility, support hormonal balance, and actually prevent and cure reproductive symptoms once and for all. You cannot patent a plant or hold a thirty-year exclusive license on knowledge that has existed in communities for centuries. The absence of pharmaceutical research into traditional herbal contraception and hormonal support is a business decision, not an oversight.
And here is the part that most women don’t understand: ovulation is not just about making babies. It’s an essential function of a healthy body. The progesterone produced after ovulation supports bone density, cardiovascular health, brain function, thyroid regulation, mood stability, immune response and so much more. Suppressing ovulation with synthetic hormones replaces a natural, whole-system physiological process with a pharmaceutical simulation that prevents pregnancy and works against optimal health. Anti-fertility, in the long-term hormonal sense, is anti-health.
They Replaced our Knowledge with a Prescription
Before colonization, women knew their bodies and fertility; this wisdom existed, held within communities and passed mother to daughter between generations.
Indigenous Bantu and Cherokee women gifted their daughters at puberty with the knowledge of cervical fluid and smooth stones with which to see it for themselves – thereafter the young ladies would always know exactly when they were potentially fertile.
Every continent had it’s indigenous herbal birth control - Egyptian papyri from 1850 BCE describe acacia suppositories with documented spermicidal properties. Greek and Roman physicians documented herbal contraceptives, including silphium - a plant so widely used for natural birth control that it was harvested to extinction by the first century CE. Ayurvedic traditions in South Asia documented fertility regulation through herbs like neem for millennia. Queen Anne's Lace – probably the most well known as an herbal “Plan B” was used by indigenous North American women as a post-coital contraceptive, and it’s efficacy has been confirmed by years of grassroots research.
Colonial medical institutions dismissed these practices as ineffective and unprofitable. The colonizer run educational systems that replaced indigenous knowledge transmission did not include women's fertility wisdom in their curricula. The knowledge did not disappear because it didn’t work. It was sidelined because it competed with what was being sold.
This living body of ancient wisdom about cycles, about the intelligence of the feminine body, the knowledge of what it means to be in relationship with fertility was largely destroyed with colonization.
Sexual Pleasure as Medicine vs. Hormonal Birth Control
There is one more dimension of what hormonal birth control does to women's bodies that is rarely included in the conversation about side effects, but is arguably one of the most profound.
In a study of 3,740 women, 43 percent reported a reduction in sexual desire attributed to hormonal contraceptive use, so, this is no longer just a “side effect” - its a defining characteristic of what the product does.
A peer-reviewed Italian study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine conducted a small study, which was significant despite the size because clitoral volume decreased in every single woman in the study group after using hormonal contraception – Every. Single. Woman.With the clitoris being one of the key arousal and pleasure centers of the female body, this is alarming. Basically, the most widely prescribed medication given to healthy reproductive-age women reduces the size and responsiveness of the organ that exists, in its entirety, for women's sexual pleasure.
The same study found reductions in intercourse and orgasm frequency and an increase in pain during sex among oral contraceptive users. A separate University of Texas study found significant deficits in vaginal blood flow and lubrication across OCP users.
Sex is medicine. It’s one of the most powerful, regenerative, connective, healing and profound gifts we have towards our overall wellbeing. Sexual pleasure is every woman's birthright.
Reality Check #3: Reproductive Freedom Was Never Theirs to Give
Truth #1:Birth control has been colonized. Beginning with the decision, made by small groups of powerful men with explicit population control agendas, to replace women's embodied fertility knowledge with a pharmaceutical product tested on the bodies of women they did not see as fully human.
Truth #2: A woman who fully understands her own body is highly unprofitable to the system that depends on her compliance. Her literacy is her freedom, and her sovereignty is the one thing the current model cannot monetize.
Truth #3: Reproductive freedom was never something this system had the authority to grant - because it was never theirs to give. It was your birthright from the beginning. They gave you dependency, but we reclaim our freedom through literacy.
Birth control has been colonized, and we’re here to take it back.
Rewild Your Birth Control
Across virtually every domain of health, we are seeing a clear and definite shift underway. Women are questioning industrialized food and returning to real foods for nourishment. We are questioning artificial light and returning to circadian rhythm and the earth. We are leaning away from synthetic materials, putting our feet on the ground, choosing movement over stagnation, and seeking out root cause practitioners and natural healing. We are beginning to understand that ancient wisdom holds more value than we were ever allowed to imagine, and science is just starting to catch up, and validate what our for-mothers already knew.
What if we took our contraceptive choices back to this ancient, earth based wisdom?
For over twenty years I have not taken a pharmaceutical drug of any kind, nor have I given a single one to either of my kids. This is not just something I talk about on the internet, it’s how I have lived, for more than two decades, through illness and injury and the full range parenting. I tell you this because everything I am about to say about returning to root cause healing and ancient wisdom is something I have been living and breathing even before it was trending.
I descend from the Mujaji Rain Queen lineage of Southern Africa. In this tradition, rain is not just weather – it’s life itself. It is the sacred water that bring food and life to the earth and to all of creation. My grandmother was a water healer and prophet, the Hosana dancers in my lineage were entrusted with climbing mountains to ask God for rain - to move between the physical and the spiritual, and my father was a water engineer.
Water and healing are in my blood, and for twenty years I have returned to Botswana virtually every year with my children - not as a tourist, but because this is our home and roots. I have sat with the indigenous elder women and Bushmen of South Africa to learn ancient womb wisdom that predates modern medicine by centuries.
There is a bridge being built right now between ancient embodied knowledge and modern science. What women understood through observation and lived transmission for thousands of years is being confirmed in research laboratories and published in peer-reviewed journals. The science is not discovering something new. It is arriving late to something women have always known.
We are reclaiming what was taken.
Womb Literacy Matters
As the foundation, womb literacy provides effective natural birth control through the sympto-thermal fertility awareness method - which is the specific, evidence-based approach that combines cervical fluid observation with basal body temperature tracking to confirm ovulation. When I refer to FAM - fertility awareness method - I mean specifically this: learning to read two of your body’s biomarkers, which takes less than five minutes a day once properly learned. This gives you a fertile window of approximately a week per cycle, and a contraceptive efficacy rate which rivals the pill – 99.6% with perfect use.
The research shows exactly what our for-mothers knew – learning FAM woman to woman is how it is most consistently effective. That means not learning from a book, or giving your power to an app to guesstimate for you, not learning from a random social media influencer or YouTube video. Learning from a qualified educator, with real live support.
As you learn to read and understand the language of the womb, your chart and observations becomes the tool of your sovereignty - the voice of your body becomes your health barometer, your monthly report card, the most detailed and continuous picture of your hormonal health that any blood panel could only approximate. Your chart can reveal hormonal imbalances, thyroid concerns, anovulatory cycles, and other signs of imbalance months before they would appear in standard testing.
And at the level that matters most, womb literacy is a sovereignty practice; the first step to reclaiming reproductive freedom from an oppressive system that is not working in your best interest. When you stop outsourcing your reproductive intelligence to a prescription and begin reading your own body as the primary source of information, something shifts that goes far beyond contraception. You become connected to your cycle in a way that changes your relationship with your body, your health decisions, your femininity - and your sense of power as a woman.
Reproductive Justice Starts Here
Womb literacy is for every woman. It empowers women wherever you are on the path: whether you’re trying to prevent pregnancy or achieve it, or neither - regardless of the gender of your partner, or if you’re single. Womb literacy is a tool that opens the door to reproductive justice in the most tangible and immediate way possible because once you have the knowledge no one can take it away from you. It levels the playing field - when you can read your own body, you’re in the driver's seat.
Remember that enslaved peoples were forbidden from learning to read?
When literacy is withheld, power concentrates in the hands of those who control information. When communities are given pharmaceuticals instead of education, dependency is engineered. When women cannot read their own bodies, they cannot fully advocate for them - in exam rooms, in relationships, in their own inner lives.
Think about what has happened to seeds. For thousands of years, farmers saved seeds from their strongest plants, passed them between communities, adapted them to local conditions, and held the knowledge of how to grow their own food within the community itself. Then GMO seed companies arrived, and the seeds became proprietary, patented, and engineered to be sterile so they could not be saved and replanted. Farmers who had grown their own food for generations became dependent on purchasing new seeds every year from the same corporations that had displaced their own knowledge.
Womb literacy is a seed you can save, replant, and pass forward. Just as you can pass this knowledge to your daughters, to your friends, to the women in your community, it creates a generational shift that pharmaceutical prescriptions structurally can’t.
The communities that have historically been most targeted for contraceptive intervention without consent - women of color, women living in poverty, all women in colonized and “developing” nations - are the same communities least likely to have access to certified FAM educators, to root cause healthcare providers, to the kind of medical encounter that asks about the whole woman. This is not accidental, when literacy is a tool of liberation, its absence is a tool of control. Womb literacy has always belonged to every woman; it’s our birthright.
Fertility Awareness Method: The Reproductive Freedom No Law or Prescription Can Take Away
The overturning of Roe v. Wade made one thing painfully clear: reproductive rights granted by law can be taken by law. The legal protections that an entire generation of women felt secure in were reversed in a single decision, and overnight, women were groveling and powerless. That’s not what we are going for! What that moment revealed is that any freedom that lives is granted by the colonial government is not something to bank on.
Womb literacy is different. A woman who understands her own fertility, who can read and understand the language of her own womb, who has a relationship with plant allies, without a prescription, or a provider's permission - that woman's freedom lives in her body. It can’t be legislated which means it cannot be overturned. It cannot be revoked by a court decision or a medication shortage or a clinic closure.
The most durable form of reproductive freedom is the kind that no one else holds the key to.
Birth Control, Redefined
It is time to redefine birth control.
Birth control as we inherited it was built for a specific purpose: manage fertility, reduce population in certain communities, generate profit, and maintain dependency on a pharmaceutical system designed by the global minority for their own ends. Here’s a little bit about how I have redefined birth control for myself.
My own journey to this reclamation wasn’t straightforward or easy. My first unplanned pregnancy came from a withdrawal mishap as I tried to navigate “natural birth control” options. My second came years later, from an unsupported, misunderstood attempt to learn the Fertility Awareness Method from a book. The gap between what I thought I knew and what I actually knew changed my life. I lived the consequence of that gap firsthand, and as much as I love my kids, I don’t want you to also have to learn the hard way.
What followed was the better part of a decade in celibacy (yes, it was as hard as it sounds). The first couple of years were about healing from a relationship - sitting with myself, and learning and growing. Then the years after were about deep, genuine and legitimate fear, of another unplanned pregnancy with no method that aligned with my holistic values that I could fully trust. I decided to throw myself deeply into FAM and learn it for real this time – like my life depended on it.
As I deepened my own practice of charting, and learned the sympto-thermal method properly and began to truly read the language of my own womb, those final years of celibacy were less about fear and more about something that surprised me: a growing sense of how sacred my sexual energy actually is. Learning to track ovulation, to be present in my body, to understand what I was offering and receiving in intimacy - it changed what I was willing to offer and to whom.
Sex is medicine. It is regenerative and connective and ancient and necessary. It is every woman's birthright. A woman whose libido has been pharmaceutically suppressed, or who avoids intimacy from fear of unplanned pregnancy because she has been given no reliable option that honors her body, is being deprived of something that belongs to her. FAM has not failed me since I learned it properly. My libido, my embodied sense of self, and my relationship with my own fertility are the best they have ever been.
The Redefined, Gold Standard of Birth Control is:
Knowledge you carry in your body- not a prescription you renew monthly for someone else’s profit
Something that tells you about your health- not just manages your fertility while leaving you illiterate about both
Less than five minutes a day once properly trained it becomes an effortless part of your life
99.6% effective Just as effective as the pill when learned from a certified educator and used perfectly
Free from carcinogens hormones and side effects
An ancient wisdom practice now validated by modern science, with roots that predate the pharmaceutical industry by centuries
Something that connects you to your body rather than disconnecting you from it
Transmittable to your daughters- a generational inheritance that no patent can own
How do we get there?
"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
— Audre Lorde
Join me in Redefining Birth Control!
In Birth Control, Redefined we go into:
1. The sex education you never received, and why that was never an accident - the full story of how the information gap you have been navigating was created, and the personal mirror of how I came to this work, including everything I did wrong before I learned to do it right.
2. The science, the myths, and what the evidence actually shows - where FAM misinformation originates, how faulty CDC data drawn largely from rhythm method users became the number your doctor quotes, and what 40+ years of scientific research actually shows about efficacy.
3. Your cycle as a vital sign - what a healthy cycle actually looks and feels like, what post-birth control syndrome actually is and what to expect, and the daily practices that support hormonal health and detox from the inside out.
4. I dive deeper into all 3 of these and talk about the other juicy things you’ll learn right here on the info page for my crash course Birth Control, Redefined.
This knowledge wasn't lost. It was taken. And it has been waiting - in the research, in the ancestral lineage, in your own body - for you to come back to it.
Thank you for reading, if this spoke with you please take a moment to share with a friend!
I would love to see you in Birth Control, Redefined!