In the past two years, over 40% of the visitors to the Natural Womanhood website have come from outside the US. In fact, people from nearly every country in the world have been on our website, revealing the global interest in the information we provide.
Why is there so much international interest in fertility awareness?
According to the United Nations, in 2015, nearly 600 million women worldwide were using a form of artificial birth control, including sterilization, IUDs, implant, injectables, the pill, and condoms. That’s more than 50 times the number of US women on the pill.
We believe that many international readers seek out our articles because they are eager to find true information about the side effects of contraception. For example, several of these women have shared with us how our article on copper toxicity from the copper IUD saved their lives (like Cheyenne from Malaysia and Szilvia from Germany).
As Obianuju “Uju” Ekeocha revealed during a powerful recent interview with Mary Rose Somarriba, and which you can read more about here, women in developing countries are strongly encouraged to take hormonal contraception. In fact, according to Uju, the “encouragement” often borders on coercion, especially when it comes to long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs), like IUDs and implants, which require a healthcare provider to remove. These women want, need, and deserve to be more fully informed of all their options when it comes to family planning.
Many people across the world are also interested in our content addressing fertility and menstrual cycle issues. For example, this article on natural boosting one’s fertility is very popular among readers in the countries of India, South Africa, and Nigeria, just to mention a few.
What are we doing to meet the needs of our international readers now?
Given the international interest in our content and message, Natural Womanhood is excited to announce the launch of our global initiative to reach even more women and couples in other regions. We are starting with these two steps:
- A Spanish website that you can view here. It includes all our main pages and many of our most popular articles—all translated into Spanish. We’re also working to update the list of fertility awareness method (FAM) services offered in Spanish-speaking countries like Mexico, and Central and South American countries. .
- A Russian Instagram account called NaturalWomanhoodRU, which will be promoting a series of our most popular articles that have been translated into Russian. Like the Spanish site, we hope to soon have a complete Russian-language version of our website.
How are we “Going Global?”
First, we were able to start this initiative thanks to the funding we raised in the spring when we interviewed Obianuju Ekeocha and you responded so generously. It paid for the translation of the entire Spanish website, and for translating key articles into French, Russian, Arabic, and Hindi.
We are in the process of recruiting volunteer Social Ambassadors in target countries like Russia and Mexico. Their role will be to use our translated articles as a starting point to launch a social media channel in their country. For example, as mentioned above, we are starting the Russian NW Instagram channel (@naturalwomanhoodru).
We hope to take this strategy worldwide, by creating local communication poles in several different regions, so that we can refer people to local services like method instructors and restorative reproductive health doctors when available. Ideally, we will be able to provide multiple method options to the public wherever we have a “pole.” Various translations of our website, along with a specific social media channel animated by a social media ambassador, will help us provide these specific, local resources in as many countries as possible.
What’s next for Natural Womanhood’s global efforts in fertility awareness?
Our next step is to find volunteers in several countries who are willing to become Social Ambassadors for us. If you are someone outside the US who is passionate about our cause, practices or teaches a fertility awareness method, speaks English, and has a knack for social media, we want to talk to you. We’re currently looking for people in Mexico, France, French-speaking Africa, India, any Arab country, and several countries in South America.
We’re also looking for funding to complete the translation of the remaining foreign language versions of the Natural Womanhood website and key articles, and to fund the management of the program on our end. If you or someone you know may feel called to this kind of generosity, we’d love to hear from you!
We know that our “Going Global” initiative is going to have an amazing impact, because we are leveraging the most popular and informative content we have already developed, to inform even more people all over the world. We are excited about providing a conduit to services that are already available in each region, in the local language.
Thank you again for the generous support that made this first step possible! It is an honor to serve such a vital cause, and to help people who have the most need for truth in women’s health.
