Natural Knowledge
“Knowledge is Power”
Mission Statement: Natural Knowledge is an independently funded organization that seeks to advocate for and educate on Women’s Health Alternatives, particularly those pertaining to birth control in an effort to protect society and the environment as a whole.
Campaign for:
“Birth Control at Your Fingertips”
The Problem:
The medicalization of contraceptive methods, via modern Magic Bullet Drugs, has separated women from basic knowledge of how their bodies work and how to be active agents in deciding their own health outcomes. The structure of hegemonic biomedicine has stayed true to its technocratic basis by silencing alternative forms of birth control. The rise of medical authority as a by-product of global capitalism has stigmatized the use of “folk” remedies. Our reason for advocating an alternative to the pill as an environmental issue is three-fold: the prevalence of adverse health impacts on people using the pill; the damage caused by the remnants of birth control pills in water supplies, its effects on the surrounding aquatic life and later on in the human consumers of this water; and promotion of the pill as the primary birth control option, despite its economic inaccessibility, as another obstacle in working to manage population growth.
The Target and the Need for Change:
Science has an overwhelming influence on the formation of our behaviour and attitudes. We aim to challenge the authority of biomedicine in the developed “West”. The pharmaceutical industry takes advantage of their authority by perpetuating the mystification of women’s reproductive systems. While the pill is a convenient, technological approach to birth control it reinforces the notion that the female body is too complex and unpredictable for anyone but scientists to decode. There is little information given by the industry on the negative health impacts of using oral contraception, ranging from blood clotting to severe mood changes.[2] In addition to these direct human concerns, the damage to the water supply warrants more attention[3], but the industry continues to claim ignorance. We are targeting individuals, both men and women, in the post-secondary education environment to question the long-term effects of using oral birth control methods and to instead consider the alternatives.
The Campaign Strategy:
Before marketing to our target audience we need to make our mission statement clear. We have developed posters, pamphlets, and a website to spread information about our group. We will seek out health food stores, naturopath offices, libraries and schools to display our pamphlets promoting our organization. We can flyer as well as advertise our lecture series in local newspaper and online event listings.
We will campaign primarily through education, thus we have set up a lecture series on the issue of alternative birth control. We hope to establish a network of peer educators that provide information as well as “word of mouth” advertising to their own personal networks.
The biggest divide we have in our target audience is male and female. We will target our male audience by introducing them to the environmental effects first as well as what the exposure to contaminated water supplies means for them.
To determine the efficacy of our campaign we will conduct surveys at the lecture series, keep track of the number of people who attend, develop a listserv to see how many people are interested in joining the group or receiving more information, and monitor the number of hits on our website.
1 “Healing Hands.” Google Images. www.templedancerstudios.com/ images/LotusHands.jpg
[2] Oral Contraceptives. 2005. Epigee Women’s Health. Hearthstone Communications Ltd. http://www.epigee.org/guide/pill.html.
[3] Knopper M. “Water is becoming a dangerous drug.” Drinking Water Backflow Prevention 20 (2003): 18-19.