Luna Lútea: FAM for birth control and cycle health

Luna Lútea is a solution for unwanted pregnancy and body illiteracy in women who lack easy access to birth control or who want a safer, more natural method.

My solution is teaching FAM (Fertility Awareness Methods) as an alternative to other, hormonal and expensive, forms of birth control. It is no secret that, especially in developing countries, birth control is not easily accessible to all. This means that many women, most of them young, do not have good ways to protect themselves against unwanted pregnancy. However, FAM teaches you how to very precisely identify (as a woman or menstruating body) the phases of your menstrual cycle, allowing you to determine, on any given day, whether you are in your fertile or infertile window. And, based on this knowledge, you can make decisions about your sexual behavior in ways that help you avoid (99.6% effectively) pregnancy. I want to teach as many women as possible the information they need in order to do this. FAM is a birth control method that, once you've learned how to use it, is free, has no side effects, relies only on each woman's autonomy and self-knowledge, and requires only pen and paper. I would do this through an online course that any woman can access and that gives them all the information and guidance needed to manage their fertility.

The problem we are trying to solve is the need for better birth control, but it can actually be separated into two dimensions, both of which we address with our solution. The first dimension is the difficult access to reliable and effective birth control, especially in developing countries such as Colombia, and the negative consequences that unwanted pregnancy brings to women in terms of their ability to pursue education and employment, and which are even worse for teenagers and rural or poor women. In Colombia, birth control can be expensive, and access is very limited outside of major cities, which means that teen pregnancy is common and the natality rate of poor women is high. The second dimension is the negative side effects that hormonal birth control has on women's health in a very broad sense. This means that even if women in Colombia are privileged enough to have access to birth control, they don't have many options that are healthy and sustainable in the long run. For example, it is known that hormonal birth control depletes nutrients, increases chances of depression and other mental illness, and causes fertility issues and hormonal imbalance in the long run, but the alternative would be condoms or other barrier methods, which are expensive and hard to find. So, many women either don't have the sexual education or the financial means to want and prioritize birth control use, and even those who do don't have many healthy, sustainable options. 

Our solution serves women. Women who are in their fertile years and who would like to avoid or achieve pregnancy naturally by profoundly understanding their fertility and their menstrual cycle. It also serves women who can't access typical forms of birth control, either because they are too expensive or because they are hard to get (this is very common in rural Colombia). Because FAM requires only knowledge to identify the fertile window, it is essentially free to use, and it has the potential to positively impact the lives of any and every woman for whom other forms of birth control aren't a sustainable solution for preventing unwanted pregnancy. Learning FAM allows you to understand your menstrual cycle in a way that makes fertility no longer be a mystery, no longer be something that is in your parter or pharmaceutical company's hands. This can have an impact on any fertile woman's health, and especially on their ability to claim their reproductive rights. And we believe that this is essential for any society that values and respects women. 

We have taught FAM to more than 30 women now, receiving feedback from all of them and bettering the course with every version of it we launch. Additionally, we have asked and interviewed many women, some similar to us (our friends and family) and some not so much, to understand their needs regarding birth control and hormonal and menstrual health. We have discovered that many women don't have access to the most common forms of birth control, many don't understand the importance, and many simply don't want to or can't use hormonal birth control, which leaves them without many options. We have also learned from our students what they like and dislike in an online course and what helps them stay committed and focused on their learning goal. Finally, we continuously survey our social media followers to better understand what they want to learn about and what they feel like they don't know enough about in terms of their menstrual cycle, their birth control methods and their fertility. 

In the past year, my partner has done the course needed to be a certified FAM instructor, we designed (and then redesigned) our FAM course, launched our social media and got to almost 3,000 followers on Instagram who have been very interested in the alternative birth control that we offer. We tested the first version of our course on 10 women and realized that it could do with some changes. So, we re-designed, re-recorded and re-edited our online course, and started the process with 10 more students, who are currently finishing the course (it takes 6 months to finish it, because you need your instructor's supervision in interpreting your menstrual cycle at first). And, we received 11 more students at the end of 2021, who took the second version of the course and have been the most successful in learning FAM with us to date, for we increased the number of meetings that students can have with their instructor and made some tweaks in the learning process. Finally, we have raised more than $300 USD to design a shorter version of the course that can be easily taught to women in vulnerable conditions, which is important.

The core technology that we use is the Symptothermal Method, a form of Fertility Awareness that was developed by doctors in the 1970's to be used with 99.6% effectiveness as birth control. However, we have also used ancestral knowledge such as Traditional Chinese Medicine in what regards menstrual cycle to complement our students' understanding and comprehension of any hormonal imbalance they might identify by using this Fertility Awareness Method. Additionally, we use the Internet and Audiovisual resources to create our online course and to give our students access to it. We have used tools such as Google Classroom and Slack for this purpose, and our next step is developing our own LMS and webpage to make the learning process that much easier and to be able to work with more women at a time, more efficiently. 

To date, we have worked with 31 women, giving them profound knowledge about their menstrual cycle, hormonal health and fertility, and teaching them how to use Fertility Awareness Methods as birth control reliably. This year, we plan to double that number, reaching 60 new students.

On one hand, we plan to teach FAM to double the women we taught this year, 60 new students. We will do this by making our payment process more efficient and building credibility through a professionally designed webpage, and by improving our social media presence. Also, by expanding our team in a way that we can scale our reach further. On the other hand, we plan to finally use the capital that we have saved (we put aside 10% of our income to teach FAM to women who would otherwise be unable to pay for our course) to design and execute our first free, in-person course for women who find themselves in a vulnerable situation, be it socioeconomically or otherwise. We will do this by making a higher revenue and by partnering with organizations who work with women that need this alternative birth control the most. 

We are measuring our progress with the number of women whose lives we've impacted with the knowledge they have received from our course. We ask our students to let us know, six months after finishing the course, whether or not they feel that FAM has given them a birth control alternative that is sustainable and effective for them in the long run. Every affirmative answer to this question is a successful case, and the more we have of those out of the number of women who have taken our course, the better our impact. 

There is definitely a financial barrier, because even though we have made a decent income this past year, and we expect to in the coming one, we have not always used our resources in the most efficient way, and we do need to pay ourselves a bit more in order to keep our work in Luna Lútea sustainable. Also, there is a barrier in terms of scalability. This is because every student we take on to learn FAM gets si months guidance from their instructor, my business partner. And, as a full time student herself, she can only take on so many students. Finally, there is a legal barrier, for both education and health services are regulated in Colombia, and it is difficult to get the permits needed to officially offer an online course regarding health like this one, which limits our scalability also. 

My business partner, friend, and co-founder of Luna Lútea is a certified FAM instructor by Sympto Pro Fertility Education. This means that she has the skills and qualifications needed to guide women and menstruating people in any point of their lives in avoiding or achieving pregnancy naturally, as well as interpreting their menstrual and hormonal health in ways that give them insight into their overall health. I, on the other hand, am an Economics student who is passionate about women's rights, particularly women's health. As an endometriosis patient myself, I know how frustrating it can be to have the only solution to your health problems, as a woman, be to go on 'the pill'. And I know the terrible side effects that it can bring, that no one should be forced to withstand to manage their pain or avoid pregnancy if they don't want to. Additionally, I am committed to learning as much about entrepreneurship and managing a social-focused business as I need to run this initiative. And, finally, we are both from Colombia, a country that is located in one of the regions with highest unwanted pregnancy stats in the world. We understand how important it is for women to be able to make their own reproductive choices, and we know that a good, integral, comprehensive sexual education is the first step. But we can't stop there. Giving women the knowledge and tools they need to self-manage their fertility autonomously and in a very cost-efficient way is a revolutionary solution to both problems: access to birth control and the need for better birth control. So, we are qualified to run and scale this business but, most importantly, we are fully committed to the cause. 

We have been creating, designing and running the pilot for this solution on our own for this whole year. 

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