Transcript:
Marya: Friends and followers, I’m just so incredibly thrilled to be able to offer this podcast interview today with Lauren Love. She is the owner of the company Wise Woman’s Choice, which is a plant-based and mineral-based non-toxic birth control method. It’s a cream, actually, and I think if you’ve been following me for a while or reading my writing, you’ll understand why I’m so passionate about the topic of birth control. Birth control plays a big role, especially the hormonal kind of conventional forms, even the copper IUD. They play a huge role in women’s mineral imbalances and therefore contribute quite a bit to women’s migraines, which we know is a hormonal problem, but it’s also a mineral deficiency problem. There’s all kinds of issues that arise when a woman has been on both hormonal birth control and the copper IUD in terms of how it affects the minerals that she needs to make testosterone, to make neurotransmitters for a healthy mood, and even her ability to detoxify heavy metals.
So the implications of our toxic centralized big medicine approach to managing women’s fertility through suppression of her ovulation is an enormous problem with such a huge scope, such a huge ripple effect when it comes to even affecting women’s consciousness, because this is the only pharmaceutical product that we have in our culture that actually is designed to shut down and suppress a normal bodily function. I’ve ranted and raved about this a lot on Instagram. I wrote an article on birth control and migraine as a women’s social justice issue, and it’s not a social justice issue in the way that it’s normally being touted. You know, in our culture, we tend to have this story that hormonal birth control is what has caused liberation for women, but I think, you know, the cat’s out of the bag at this point. Women know, and have been saying for a long time, you know, that the side effects just are really terrible when it comes to women having to bear the burden of countless potential side effects caused by these mineral imbalances, all the way up to cancer, but, you know, including lowered testosterone, increased migraines. Occasionally, women do actually get improvement in their migraine symptoms initially, and this could be because the woman is low in copper and estrogens and progestins increase the absorption of copper at the expense of zinc, but over time, even women who initially gain benefit in their migraine symptoms from hormonal birth control will eventually end up with greater depletion, and this is in part because they’re leaning on something exogenous to them, something outside of their body, which is not regulating your hormones. If you’re becoming more and more dependent on an external source of synthetic hormones.
So Lauren and I discuss a lot of the implications and politics and sociology around birth control in this first section, since I’ll be dividing this podcast down into two sections, since it was a long conversation. She talks a little bit about her history with hormonal birth control and how she discovered this non-toxic method, how it was passed down to her, and how she became a lineage holder of this tradition, which I believe is part of the folk medicine tradition. And then in part two of this podcast, we will continue to explore, again, the socio-political implications of women having access to this type of birth control and how it’s part of a bigger revolution and movement to help women get their power back. And they can do it in tandem with their partners. And in part two of this, we will talk about decentralized birth control and demedicalizing the womb. So I know you’ll enjoy this conversation and we’ll just dive right in now with the interview with Lauren.
Thanks for listening. There are so many places we could start, but first of all, just talk about, you know, how and how, what your birth control journey was that kind of led you to this point, to discovering this product. And of course we can get into, you know, how you came to be running a business and a company and selling this, but just start with what kind of birth control you were on before you found out about this and how you found out about this.
Lauren: So when I was 17, my mom took me to the gynecologist for the first time and got me on hormonal medication for PMDD because I was like too emotional around my periods. So that was an easy gateway to getting me on birth control. Um, you know, and, and also the beginning of my, my journey with gynecological violence. Um, so I went and I, my mom promised me I wouldn’t have a pap smear and they promised me that. And then they forced a pap smear on me and put me on hormonal birth control. So I was on that in college and, and then I wasn’t sexually active. So I got off of it. Um, and I remember like throwing up on the first day of my period, having to get off the bus in college because I was like passing out and like, like falling over. Uh, it, it really was a hard journey getting off of that shit. And then I got back on it, um, you know, and spent basically the next 10 years on and off different methods.
I tried the ring, which was terrible. I tried the generic brand of these pills and this brand and this brand and, and all the while really being terrified of pregnancy, um, using condoms too, and pulling out and terrified prayers, like really living in this fear in the back of my being at, at a very base level, um, that affected everything. And I got on a pill that was working well for me. It was a generic pill. And then I went to travel in Asia for a really long time. And I ran out of birth control and I was told that my generic was the same as a name brand. So I grabbed this name brand thinking everything’s cool. And, uh, it, it brought me almost immediately into depression, which I, I really am like a super joyful being. And so going into depression was really foreign and scary for me. Um, then I went back to San Francisco where I was living and I got back on the generic and started feeling like myself, but I didn’t put it together yet. Then I moved to Portugal with the guy I met traveling that we traveled for a year together. And when I was there again, I ran out of the generic. I got back on this name brand and I, I went into a really deep depression for like six months. I couldn’t get out of bed till one in the afternoon, I gained 20, 30 pounds. I, I would be in a room full of friends and I’d like go to the bathroom, break down crying. Like I had this dream boyfriend in life and I was miserable and I didn’t know why.
And so during this journey, I was in Lisbon and there’s very little nature, although it’s a beautiful city. And the one tree that was there would be like, come sit on me. And I would like feel better or this little patch of earth. This is when nature first started kind of communicating with me. This little bit of earth would be like, come sit on me. So, and I would feel better, you know? And so I knew I was getting the message. I needed to be closer to nature. So I moved to Austin, Texas. And from there I had a good friend who became the father of my first daughter. Who’s was like, yeah, the birth control is terrible for you. That might’ve been, you know, why you didn’t feel good. And I was like, no way. And then I tried to get on birth control. It was really expensive and I hadn’t had to pay much for it before. And so I got off and I remembered that my older cousin had said, you don’t need birth control. I’m 42. I’ve never used it. Just like taking control of your fertility. But I grew up Catholic where the joke is like, what if you call people who use natural birth control, you know, like parents. So I was in this mentality that no way this could work, but I got off of it.
And when I got off of it, I immediately not only felt better, but I had a spiritual awakening. It was like, my essence came back. I studied art and I hadn’t made art in six years. And I started making art. I went and sold my first piece. I started selling thousands of dollars of it. I decided to move to Costa Rica to be closer to nature. I decided to not work for anybody else. It was like, I came into myself and my essence came back to me in such a powerful way. I began to cultivate community in a way I never had before. And, and my whole life changed.
Marya: that’s so poignant to me, because it really speaks to the way how shutting down the natural physiological process of ovulation shuts down our creativity and our vital life force. And like you’re saying, our essence and our actual connection to ourselves on so many levels. And if you think about the implications of that on a societal level, cause it’s like what 250 million people worldwide. I mean, it’s just mind boggling to think of, you know, your experience that you’re describing right here, which you’re describing as gynecological violence. I think it’s really valuable and important that we be pretty bold in the language that we use. I’m glad that you’re being that upfront that that is actually what it is. The implications of that are just huge in terms of even just impact on culture of women don’t have connection to their creativity. Like in my case, I was only on the pill for six months and I felt like there was like cellophane. I felt like my, like you’re saying your essence, I felt like it couldn’t breathe, like that I was coated in a layer of like plastic that was suffocating my very being. And I got off of it immediately. So, so I know you were on a trajectory, but like how long were you on it total as far as the hormonal birth control? 10 years or more like 10 years. Yeah. Okay. We’ll continue.
Lauren: Giving drugs to a teenage girl with zero information about side effects, when some of those side effects could be that you can die is violence. And that’s what we’re because it’s happening to girls all the time. People are being prescribed birth control alongside antidepressants at 17 years old, 15 years old. Ironic to balance their hormones, right? Which is insane because it’s not balancing your hormones if it’s suppressing something, but yeah. And what we know about the way it affects minerals. Yeah. And causing hypothyroidism and it depletes iodine and it depletes zinc and vitamin C and all these like really essential nutrients. But I won’t, I won’t go into that now, but yeah, we know the mechanism for why it causes these things, not to mention loss of libido, right? It’s shutting down your hormonal system, your system with your sex hormones, it’s shutting down over 150 different mechanisms in the body. When I was in this depression, I felt like I couldn’t reach God. You know, I’m very connected to, to God and it cuts that in a, in a deep way. And, and we, this is the heart and soul of why I’m doing what I’m doing. Because, you know, Dr. Sarah E. Hill, who is one of the top researchers on this shared something so profound, which is that hormone or birth control is literally structurally and chemically altering our brain. In doing there are so many effects, but the effect that drives into my heart and soul and that I experienced is that this stuff is affecting the version of ourselves, of women everywhere that we are both experiencing and creating. So we are being altered at a core level and the world will never know the true essence of the woman on hormonal birth control. She will never know her true essence. She’ll never step into her true gifts, her true offerings. And imagine the effects of hundreds of million of depressed mothers, sisters, the risk for suicide goes up by 300%, 300%. I have an uncle who committed suicide as a side effect. I was one of the main side effects to a drug. This is real. And so we have depressed women being cut off from their essence and from their ability to feel connection with the divine. This is deep.
And all the while we’ve had natural tools, you know, our cream is not the first natural birth control. And yeah, so natural birth control doesn’t have to just look like plants to have an abortion. Absolutely not. Women have been using wise ways forever. And thank God, some of these wise ways we still very much know and understand. So this is also part of the revolution that not just the cream would be available or fertility awareness, but a complete knowledge of the tools we have for every circumstance around our fertility, so that we don’t have to live in fear. We don’t have to feel powerless. We don’t have to outsource our authority any longer.
Marya: You’re speaking my language because really seriously, like half my work as a coach is about “stop outsourcing your power to medical professionals”. And I’m only a coach, but also don’t outsource your power with me. You know, like this is about women, you know, holistic health is about women claiming their power back or people, just people centering in their core, in their, what we would call their midline in craniosacral therapy. And really, yeah, it’s essentially where our essence and our spirit lives in our body as embodiment. So I love that you’re talking not only about the revolution, but about the fact that there are wise ways, plural. When we’re thinking of holistic health, it’s not just like one silver bullet solution, right? Like you’re not saying that your cream is the answer to everything. It is a part of a holistic approach to women being well, which of course is the foundation of our society being well, if women are well, right? Since we are the portals through which these souls come, but that it’s part of a long tradition. It’s not something new. It’s like, it’s something that’s being resuscitated because women, you know, all throughout history and in many different cultures had, you know, had natural forms of birth control. And so this, I just love it. I just think it’s so ironic that our culture thinks we’re like so evolved and so technologically advanced and we’re actually really not in the dark ages. And essentially that like hormonal birth control on so many levels, it’s not just gynecological violence, but we know that it’s part of this broken paradigm because it’s based in suppression. And like you’re saying, if you suppress something physiologically, like what are you suppressing emotionally, psychologically, spiritually? And what does that say about our culture that our so-called liberation is based off of like, you know, half the population being totally suppressed. So anyway, we could, there’s just, thank you for what you’re doing. So I’ll try to stop interrupting you. Let’s continue. Let’s get into the revolution part and all the work with the FDA too, but let’s, I want to try to continue your story of, okay. So you were on it for 10 years and you had a daughter or you had your first child in Austin.
Lauren: No, I got off and I had this spiritual awakening and I began to study fertility awareness. We use condoms a couple of times, but I find them repulsive. So we started using fertility awareness and my first couple of years in fertility awareness were not following it clearly. They weren’t with a clear understanding. I read taking control of your fertility, which is like the Bible on this, but it was very hard for me to digest and really integrate into my life at first. And my, my partner at the time, and I had already had a very strong, uh, daily sensation of our, of our child with us. And so I understand that in the depths of me, I wanted this child, even though I didn’t feel fully ready for it. And, uh, and we actually said, okay, let’s conceive in, in February. And then we were like, no, no, no, but we did. And then I had a miscarriage and then we conceived again because I was just loosely following it. Like, I think I’m fertile. I think I’m not, you know, I’m doing it. And, and I didn’t understand that I wasn’t doing it. And then right before we became pregnant with my now daughter by making love on the last day of my period, which I thought was cool, but it goes against the first rule of fertility awareness is breaking the rules.
So this method works because I’ve gone on practicing 11 years now with only one more, very intentional pregnancy, but you have to understand it. And, and that’s what I’m doing. I have digested this over 11 years and it’s my passion to make fertility awareness very simple because it can be so simple and it can be such a deep and beautiful and clear relationship with your body. So, so we became pregnant with my daughter. We bought one way tickets to Costa Rica. And we found out like a week later that we were pregnant. We were like, okay, came here with very little money and started a life. And 10 years later, we’re still here.
And we had an amazing home birth with my daughter. And I began to feel this call to midwifery. I saw a documentary called birth as we know it, highly recommend. And I started shaking and crying and I didn’t know I was pregnant, but I knew I had to be a midwife. And I started seeking out midwives here to apprentice with. So I came down here and had my first baby with like a total ecstatic, holy, amazing birth and began birth work. And a whole midwife library was gifted to me and I did trainings and I had a, I prayed for a mentor and a mentor moved here a 40 years experience. I apprenticed with her and another mentor. And in my midwifery birth attendant training, I got formal training in fertility awareness. And, and then from there, from there. And, and so through these years, I was still using condom some during my fertile times, practicing fertility awareness and always hated it. And was like, there has to be a natural way. There has to be a better way.
And so right before COVID started, I decided I’m supposed to teach the fertility awareness method, but I want to teach it with tools and I want to have these tools for when I’m fertile. So I don’t have to use a condom ever again. So, so I did a deep dive into this and I spent like over a year just researching and talking to midwives who work with this and, and practicing all kinds of things. So I discovered all these natural tools and started teaching women’s circles and I made an online course. And one day I discovered the cream.
But first I had learned about neem oil, which the natural birth control conversation is totally incomplete without neem oil. This is a very like accessible folk medicine. Let’s say to everyone, this has been a spermicide for thousands of years and it’s very effective. It’s supposed to kill a hundred percent of the sperm within 20 to 30 seconds. So it’s an incredible tool. Many people say you can put neem oil right afterwards, which I did for years, but paired with semen retention. However, I personally know two women who got pregnant doing that in the last year. So I really, if you use neem oil, you need to put it first. And the issue with neem oil is that it feels good. It has all these amazing properties. It’s been shown in studies to stop the spread of STDs. And, but it has a very bad smell. This was a big mood killer for me. I never put it in first. Like I said, we always put it after, but paired with semen retention, if I was fertile. So anyway, I, we’re doing this, I’m learning all these other tools I’m teaching.
And one day I get on the internet many years ago before everybody had a program online and stuff. And I’m like, is there any competition for this? Are people even going to like this or care, you know, feeling sorry for myself a bit. And I’m looking for like, do I have competition online or if people are doing this and I find this cream with this like ancient lady, you know, this old lady talking about how this cream is a hundred percent effective made from all plant extracts and organic minerals that she’s a Harvard doctor. Here’s the video of how it’s stopping sperm.
This was during COVID. So, you know, I went through years of practicing fertility awareness. And then I went deeper into it with my midwife studies and began teaching and sharing. And, and then, so after using the neem oil and the semen retention and learning these tools, I found, I found an even better tool for me. And I found this cream online and it was made by a woman that was then in her nineties already named Dr. Francoise Ferrant. And she created it by making a wash for herself that she’d washed before intimacy. And one day she got interrupted in the shower and made love and the semen came out in a clump. So she was a Harvard-trained scientist and she was like, I’m going to experiment. So she kept doing it. It kept happening. And, and then she tested it and she saw it was working. And she had a big case study of a bunch of couples in her age that didn’t mind if they got pregnant or not try it for, you know, many cycles and nobody became pregnant, but she was like a full on Harvard scientist and didn’t have really the time to develop it.
And it wasn’t until one of her best friend’s daughters died from hormonal birth control at the age of like 24 from a blood clot that she decided she had to, that this was her mission to bring it to the world. So she started Smart Women’s Choice.
So that was the cream that I discovered. And I immediately in that moment, I knew I was supposed to carry on her mission somehow. And I reached out to her immediately to get a bunch of cream to bring to Costa Rica.
And I actually got to teach her fertility awareness in her nineties. She had never heard of it. She had no idea that you couldn’t get pregnant every day of the month. And she was like 99 at this point, or how old was she at this point? She was like 96, 97. Cause I, yeah, that was about five, six years ago. So she gave me a bunch. I brought it back here. I started using it and sharing it when I would teach women’s circles. And then my community found out that I had it. So they would just stop by everybody using it, zero pregnancies. And, and so then at one point I was like, hi, can I get more, you know, like a year and a half later? And she was like, yeah, you can get more, but you’re going to have to make it yourself. And I’m like, what? And she basically sent me the formula. I was like, is this a joke?
So I went to meet her in San Diego and she was 99 then. And she passed me the formula and all her tips for making it and shared with me about her journey, her life. She was a Holocaust survivor. So pretty interesting life and a brilliant woman. She studied at NYU and Berkeley and was an amazing woman. So, so yeah, she passed it all to me. She gave me permission to rebrand because she, she was in a legal battle with her partner at Smart Women’s Choice. She had worked with a younger woman who then took control of the company and cut her off. So they were in a lawsuit and she was trying to get the company back, but she knew she needed another producer.
They were having problems with the FDA coming after them. And so us making it in Costa Rica just happened to be a perfect fit because we are able to make it here with full approval from the ministry of health for sale and pharmacies. We have it in doctor’s offices here. We have it in organic shops. And then we have it internationally online.
And so she passed me the formula and my partner just happens to be a really brilliant chemist who has been working with natural medicines for years. And so we teamed up to create Wise Woman’s Choice and improving the formulation.
Marya: Your partner is a chemist. Did his expertise help in tweaking the recipe at all?
Lauren: Yeah. So it was Smart Woman’s Choice. It was working well for people, but it was irritating. Not everybody, but way too many people. And so when I met her, I was like, Hey, if this cream irritates people, I don’t want to work with it. And she’s like, no, it shouldn’t. Something’s wrong. So we tested the pH and the pH was a little off with these creams. And so we began working on that as like, we need to maintain the base formula, but it needs to feel good. It needs to feel like just a little bit extra lubrication and be compatible with the body. So he’s been refining it for two years and we have built this business. It’s a family business. We built it with all our own investment and the little bit that our moms sneak to us, you know so, but little by little, we’ve been getting more and more high-level lab equipment so that we can accurately test like every measurement of every ingredient. And now we’re getting a very high end sperm testing machine, or we just got it. So we’ll be able to run our own tests that just print out and can really show the truth about the cream.
Marya: I want to stop for just one second. So just, I want to put in a quick plug for Folk Medicine here before we get into more of the technicalities of how the cream works and everything. And even though Dr. Francois was a Harvard trained scientist and like a scientist, the fact that she developed it for her own use in the absence of anything better available, to me, makes me consider that to be kind of like part of a Folk Medicine tradition and certainly the way you’re carrying it forward, even though your partner is a scientist as well, is very much in this kind of tradition of Folk Medicine, or medicine for the people by the people. So she created it for herself and then she made it more widespread because of the concern with the negative effects that the mainstream options were having. And of course, that’s an extremely political thing to do to create a non-toxic effective alternative to a multi-billion dollar industry. And we’ll get into the politics of that shortly here. But so let’s see, anything else we should say about Dr. Francois before we move on to, I’m just looking at my notes here, the mechanism of action. So essentially she owned Smart Women’s Choice was the name of the company initially, right? And this was like six years ago that you came in contact with her.
Lauren: Smart Women’s Choice opened in 2014. So it’s been around for a while now. And when I met her, it had already been used by tens of thousands of people. And then Wise Women’s Choice was born like two and a half years ago, and that is when we started working with the formula and we released it maybe like two years ago at Envision Festival here in Costa Rica is when we really launched it.
Marya: Maybe you could distinguish here when we’re going to start to get into the technicalities of how it works and its efficacy. But maybe because I know there’s some other brands. I’ve never used these, I’m not that familiar with the brands, but is it Phexy? There’s other kind of spermicidal creams. Maybe you can talk a little bit of, cause I think those work on pH. Maybe they’re a little acidic or something. Is that correct? And your product is not acidic. So it’s pH neutral. Is that right? It’s pretty neutral. Yeah. Because I know like when a woman’s vaginal pH is more acidic at times when she’s not fertile and part of the way that she becomes fertile is the pH of her vagina becomes more neutral. So it seems kind of like a cream that is neutral. I mean, obviously that’s not the mechanism of action is not by changing the pH. So that’s actually pretty impressive that you could have a cream that’s pH neutral, but it’s still effective. So maybe you can talk a little bit about that.
Lauren: That’s what I didn’t understand about the cream at the beginning. And also because I was like, well, an acidic vagina will kill sperm. That’s fertile. If we don’t have any cervical fluid, because as we release cervical fluid, are you only becomes more alkaline and this fluid will house the sperm for many days. Right? So I didn’t understand, but it’s not, it’s the pH shift is not the mechanism of action for our cream. Um, like it’s a little part of it. It there’s a multifaceted synergistic effect basically that’s going on with our cream, even though it’s a very simple cream, it’s all plant extracts and minerals. The way it works is that, um, why is this technically a soap? So it’s an all natural soap cream and the nature of soap, the amphiphilic nature, uh, disrupts sperm membranes. And so the, this leads to their immobilization. Um, now there’s also a chelation of essential ions, which are calcium and magnesium in the sperm. And this happens because of potassium citrate. So it is derived from citrus and a folk remedy for birth control is lemon juice. Lemon juice is killing sperm in like 30 seconds. This can be very abrasive to your vagina, obviously. However, if you’re in a pinch, you can put some lemon juice in.
Marya: I used to actually do the vinegar and water wash to just change the pH up because, you know, raw organic apple cider vinegar is probiotic, too. It never agitated my tissues. So, let’s go back into, so you’re saying the calcium and magnesium.
Lauren: So, there’s a chelation of these ions by the potassium citrate, and this deprives the sperm of critical cofactors that are needed for motility or for them to be able to move.
Now, this is where we get to the pH effect in it. It’s temporary alkaline, so it’s around seven. It’s between like seven and eight is the pH. So, it’s a temporary alkaline environment, and the potassium ions are inducing osmotic stress, which is also impairing the sperm functionality, and then the cream itself is a lipid-rich formula, which means it has fat in it, and this acts as a barrier. It’s trapping sperm and preventing the motility just basically from the texture and viscosity of the cream.
Marya: When I read that in the Fifth Vital Sign that essentially the mucus or the cervical mucus on the cervix acts as like a highway to kind of siphon these sperm up, but maybe if there’s fat in the way, that kind of disrupts that highway, or I could see how it could kind of block their motility. So, between it blocking their motility and this mineral chelation effect, or the way the potassium is kind of disrupting the mineral balance that they need to thrive, it’s disrupting the sperm motility, like the way the sperm’s tail moves, or that’s what I saw in the video on your website, like it’s affecting the tail.
Lauren: It’s affecting their ability to swim. Like simply put, the mechanism of action of the cream is that it makes the sperm immobile, and it does it in a very effective way.
So, you know, we don’t become pregnant in the vagina. An egg is fertilized way up in the fallopian tubes, which the time for a sperm to reach an egg is like a man walking halfway around the world. Is that so crazy? But anyway, so what the cream—
It stops them so that they can’t swim through the cervix to reach the fallopian tubes. Like if they can’t swim, they can’t get there, you know?
Marya: You mentioned that she, when she first created this for herself, that there was like a glob, does it kind of bring it all together in one piece or not? Because I wasn’t sure if that’s how it works.
Lauren: For me, it doesn’t, but I know everybody’s body is different, you know? So, but for me in general, it doesn’t. And our instructions are to just wash it with water afterwards. You leave it for a while and then wash it out. You know, when you go to the bathroom, it kind of is all coming out and you can wash it. Just rinse to restore your vaginal microbiome. Like I get it out afterwards just to let me come back to balance since that’s such a like delicate microbiome area. Even though the cream is natural, it’s still shifting the PHC and all this.
Marya: Beautiful. Oh, that’s so cool. Okay, so even though you’ve owned the company just for a few years, you’ve been using it for more like six years effectively. I got pregnant using the fertility awareness method. I think I was like five days past ovulation. And so I thought I was in the safe, but so like, so I was thinking if I were to get this cream, like I would maybe feel comfortable tentatively using it in tandem with fertility awareness. And obviously it’s a good thing to know about how your fertility works and be tuned into your body. But I was thinking maybe like, again, avoiding the most fertile window and just using the cream like as a backup on non-fertile days, which in a way is kind of funny because you’re not fertile at that time anyway. It’s like, right, there’s no risk of really getting pregnant if you’re not fertile, obviously. So, but instead of using it as a backup, you’re saying you actually use it in lieu of condoms during your fertile time.
Lauren: Absolutely. Yeah. That’s the whole point. Yeah. And it’s me, everybody asks me, well, can they ejaculate inside? And I’m like, well, that’s the point. It’s acting on the sperm to immobilize them.
So I’ve been using it alongside fertility awareness for years. And what this looks like in my real life is that when I’m fertile, when my fertile window opens, I use the cream that whole time and I count the extra days and I make sure that my fertile window’s really closed before I go without. And then the whole rest of the month, I don’t use it.
Marya: Yeah. You don’t use it when not fertile. Fascinating.
Lauren: Yeah. When I’m fertile, I absolutely use it. Why would you need to use it if you’re not fertile?
Marya: Yeah. You’re kind of using it in the opposite way of how I would probably have used it initially. Just out of fear that, you know.
Lauren: It takes time to adjust, absolutely, you know. And if people don’t feel comfortable using it, they shouldn’t use it, you know. If you and your intuition and your being know, and you can trust that thousands of women have used this with around a 1% pregnancy rate, you know, then do it.
But the whole point of empowerment around our fertility is that we would come into a place where we don’t have fear in our sexuality. We don’t have fear on our fertility. And so the cream should give you confidence. And if you’re not ready for that, it’s okay. You know, there are other ways. But for me, I was just so stoked to have something that didn’t smell like neem oil. We were like, really? Awesome. And because I was using the neem oil afterwards, putting the cream before for me was like a step ahead of giving me extra peace of mind. And yeah, I did trust it because I saw how it immobilized the sperm. And I also trusted Francois, and I was like, okay, that’s good enough for me. And I wanted it to work because I wanted the solution to be real, you know.
Marya: And then once you start using it and you don’t get pregnant, then you trust it more and more and more. And so I think, yeah, that’s what I’m interested in is that transition process of learning to trust it. And it sounds to me like you already were on a journey where you had been trusting other methods of natural birth control, and you had a personal relationship with her, so you trusted her. And yeah, and obviously there’s a lot of case reports. So when you talk about that 1% fail rate that’s still just based off of anecdotes. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with anecdotes. I’m not someone who pooh-poohs anecdotes. But she had case studies that she had done, but she didn’t have evidence of the case studies because the other business partner had them. So she essentially doesn’t really have documentation of these case studies, but she did do case studies at a certain point, but we just don’t know how many people were in them.
Lauren: When I inherited the formula and everything, Smart Women’s Choice had already sold around 20,000 units in the real world. And they were reporting 99.8% efficacy, which means that two out of every 1,000 women were becoming pregnant, which is insane.
Marya: That’s insane. But that’s just based off of whether someone told them or not, right? That’s not based off of studies. It’s just kind of like the assumption there is that if anyone got pregnant, they would be like kind of pissed that the method failed and they would let the company know, right?
Lauren: Yeah, and also with us, we’ve had around a 1%, so that’s a little bit higher for a rate of pregnancy, but birth control pills with general use are like 91 to 93%. So that’s like nine to 7%. Now we’ve had around 1,000 users since we started working with it. And if I had 70 to 90 women telling me I was pregnant, I would quit. I would have a huge meltdown and quit. Even though that’s how effective birth control pills are in the real world and condoms are 87%. So that would look like 130 people contacting me, telling me they’re pregnant.
Now we have had people contact us and tell us they’re pregnant, you know, but we also have like half of those users already have had their baby and now are using the cream again because it did work for them for years. So the thing with the cream is you have to reapply it. If you’re switching positions, you know, and pulling out and re-penetrating, you have to make sure the cream’s in there at the time of ejaculation. That is the key to its efficacy. So when I use it and I know I’m super fertile, did it last night, okay, I put extra, I make sure it’s really in there, you know, and I even put a little bit afterwards just because I knew I’m like ovulating.
Marya: Obviously how well you use it or the way you use it has an effect on the efficacy too. So the people who got pregnant, we don’t necessarily know that they were using it properly or, I mean, it seems like there’s obviously variability in how consistent people might be in that.
Lauren: It’s helped us to refine how we share how to use it because we had pumps for a little while and one pregnancy was like, she’s like, I even used two pumps. And I’m like, well, in your instructions, it says use five, you know? And so I’m sorry it didn’t work for you, but you didn’t follow the instructions. One of our very first batches became runny. And so that was responsible for four of the pregnancies. And we recalled that batch and we’ve just refined the formula so much since then. But we did, you know, release the cream that became runny at the beginning because we were learning the formula still.
So yeah, so, and it was like divine grace. Three of these people were sisters using it and now they’re so happy. I’m like, wow. And they just, one of them decided to keep using it. One of the women who got pregnant still went back to it afterwards, right?
Yes, because she used it for years before and it worked for her. And so like several of our users who became pregnant came back to using it.
Marya: What about the Costa Rican Ministry of Health? How did you convince them? Obviously they’re not as dogmatic or corrupt as the FDA, but what was that process like to get, is it the Costa Rican Ministry of Health that approved it? Because you’re selling it right now in health food stores and stores in Costa Rica. So how did they, what kind of criterion did they have for you selling it?
Lauren: So we presented what we knew of the prior company and because it was already for sale in the States, that kind of helped push it through. And because it’s an all natural cream, they accept it more easily because there’s no chemicals going on, there’s no pharmaceutical aspect to it. And so their regulation is to allow natural products to exist.
So as long as it’s not chemically harming someone or affecting the physiology of the person’s hormonal system, even if they don’t know if it’s effective or not, they’re not gonna prohibit it. This is what happened with us. I can’t speak for the Costa Rican Ministry of Health. But we’re passed as a natural product.
We’re also, our worldwide certification for it’s called a GTIN number. This is for a hormonal birth control because non-hormonal birth control doesn’t even exist. But that’s our certification and then we’re certified as like a natural cream here, but with permission to sell in pharmacies.
So yeah, I speak it as divine grace, because this came to us as like a gift and as a mission and it’s opened up for us in this way. So I just am like, thank you, you know, thank you.
Marya: Yeah, well, maybe now might be a good time to get into this as a movement and to share as much or as little as you’d like about kind of the broader scope of the vision you have and the politics. Obviously there’s infinite politics around anything to do with birth control, but the politics around some of the challenges you’re facing with the FDA. Tell me more about the bigger kind of sociological and regulatory politics around this that are on the horizon and how you’re going to bypass the harassment and the centralized birth control industry and create a decentralized birth control revolution.
Lauren: So what’s been happening is that since we started to produce WISE and make it public, we received a letter from the FDA, basically saying you can’t do that. It’s acting on a mechanism of the body and it’s classified as a unapproved drug. And Smart Women’s Choice was shut down by the FDA because they were producing and selling an unapproved drug or what they classified as such.
So I responded to them saying, it doesn’t actually affect a system of the body. It affects sperm once it’s left the body. Now, the FDA still wants to regulate our excrement, apparently, because they say that it’s affecting a system of the body by acting on sperm once it’s already left the body.
So apparently they have jurisdiction, even over things that have left our body. That’s interesting to me. No, we also made really clear to them that it has no pharmaceutical agents, that it’s not intended to treat, cure, prevent, or diagnose any disease. However, they still have a problem with it. We also let them know we produce in Costa Rica where we have full permission from the Ministry of Health. This is where we operate.
But we do now serve quite a clientele in the States and we began to run Google ads, which we were blocked in a long time. And then that opened up. And I think that’s what alerted the FDA to who I am and where I am.
And we got a visit at my parents’ house from a criminal investigator from the FDA. And what she basically said was, actually, this is all really dumb. And because my father asked her, hey, it’s an all natural cream they’re doing, and he was real vague, like, I don’t even know, she’s in Costa Rica. But he’s like, so do they just need a disclaimer or do they need to change their wording?
She said, yeah, this is all really dumb because they could actually totally, legally do this as a natural product, but the wording needs to change. So we were like, that’s great. However, now, to be a natural product and to legally sell in the States, we have to not say fertility, not say birth control, not say stop sperm motility, not share about our real life statistics, not share about how it was tested, not share, and so this presents kind of a big problem in communication, but I really am taking it as a gift because it’s time we demedicalize our wombs.
And the true movement and what I’m receiving is that this is about womb sovereignty. And that’s what I want to share. So I think we’re actually gonna call the cream in the States Womb Sovereignty.
Yes, yes, it’s time to demedicalize our wombs.
Marya: So I will cut off the first half of our interview there because this was a longer interview. I know some podcasts, they do really long interviews, but I wanted to break this up a bit. You know, a lot of moms who are at home with kids or just busy people don’t have time to listen to two hours straight of podcast interviews.
So stay tuned for the second part of this conversation where we will continue the discourse around the very big undertaking, but very possible undertaking of decentralized birth control and demedicalizing our wombs.
In the meantime, while you’re waiting for that next episode, please check out Lauren’s website, where you can purchase Wise Woman’s Choice.
Also, check out my blog post that I created on migraine and birth control as a women’s social justice issue where I talk a little bit more about some of the nutrient deficiencies caused by birth control and the copper IUD.
Here is a link to my little mini course, Nutritional Support for Women on Hormonal Birth Control and the Copper IUD. This can be shared with anyone, whether they have migraines or not – anyone who is considering hormonal birth control or looking for to understand better which minerals to take to counterbalance the depletions that birth control causes.
And of course, in that little mini course, now I can offer a true alternative with the hopes that women will actually not have to understand those mineral dynamics and not have to take supplements to counterbalance, but rather can simply just choose a non-toxic method if this seems appealing to them that will not cause any mineral depletions or deficiencies.
Thanks for listening. And stay tuned for the next episode.
