Stephanie Benson President
Stephanie grew up overseas, living in Peru, Oman, Switzerland, and Greece, and graduated from UCLA with a degree in international development and anthropology. She is currently coordinating a cultural preservation project, and when her nose isn't in a book she enjoys sunshine, sand, and spending time with animals.
Adam also spent most of his childhood overseas, living in Gambia, Oman, and England for over 10 years. He graduated from Arizona State University's business school with a degree in management and is currently working for a heritage management organization. Adam avoids wearing a tie and goes surfing whenever he can.
Adam Dorr Chief"Executive Officer
If you're interested in joining the Emergency Birth Control team or would like to contribute your time or resources in any way, use the form on the Ask a Question page or email us at ask@emergencybirthcontrol.org.
 
The mission of the Emergency Birth Control Organization is to:
1.
Empower women by enabling them to make decisions based on the latest reproductive health and technology information.
2.
Create awareness about EBC, particularly in high-risk populations.
3.
Create awareness about EBC among health care providers and pharmacists by providing them with accurate, detailed, and current information.
4.
Dispel stigma, rumors and other misinformation that has been spread about EBC.
5.
Improve women's access to EBC.
6.
Install EBC in the sex education curriculum of middle schools and high schools.
7.
Uphold women's rights.
Our primary goal is to empower women with information so that they can make informed decisions about their sexual and reproductive health. By empowering women, we hope to help them exercise their inalienable rights to decide what happens to their own bodies, to decide when they want to become pregnant, and to give them control over when, where, and how they want to start a family.

We believe that no one has the right to dictate how other people should live their lives, sexually or otherwise. We do not presume to judge women or their behavior based on our own values, priorities or sensibilities. We live in a free country, and we support every individual's inalienable right to make his or her own decisions and choose his or her own path in the pursuit of happiness as long as it is in compliance with the law.

We strongly disagree with didactic groups who seek to impose their own standards of behavior, conduct and morality upon others by means of disseminating misinformation and perpetuating ignorance and fear.

We believe that the truth will indeed set us free. Our primary goal, which is to empower women with the freedom to make knowledgable choices by providing them with accurate, current, unbiased information about their reproductive health options, is best achieved by creating awareness.

General Strategy

Other organizations are doing critical work to improve women's access to EBC. However, we feel that not enough is being done to create awareness about EBC. We believe that creating awareness about EBC will generate demand for it, and that demand will in turn drive supply.

Our awareness campaign is scalable, meaning that the geographic and demographic areas it targets and the different media it utilizes are limited only by funding.

At the moment, our limited level of funding means that we are operating locally in the greater Los Angeles area and are targeting primarily high-school and college students. Our awareness campaign is modeled after street-level corporate advertising campaigns, and is therefore based primarily on the distribution of flyers, posters, and pamphlets at key locations on campuses and at health care centers.

As our level of funding increases, we hope to expand the scope of our campaign to include distribution of materials throughout California and eventually nationwide, and ultimately to utilize a variety of media including print ads, billboards, radio, and television.

1.

To communicate our message effectively to our target audience in their own language and on their own terms.

We believe that a current shortcoming of other EBC awareness campaigns is that they do not convey their message in ways to which the target audience is able to be receptive. Their presentation, despite good intentions, is academic to the point of being obfuscatory, and often rather pompous.
2.
To communicate to the target audience that women do not become pregnant immediately after intercourse. Rather, the biological process of becoming pregnant can take as long as a week.
A significant source of the confusion between EBC and the RU-486 abortion pill, along with the general misunderstanding that EBC is an abortifacient, is that most people unconsciously assume pregnancy begins immediately upon insemination. Based on this first false assumption, it is then also incorrectly assumed that medication which acts after insemination must terminate pregnancy, and must therefore be an abortifacient.

We believe that it may be more effective to communicate this information visually than verbally, and so one of our tactics is to illustrate the process of pregnancy and biological action of EBC with diagrams, animation, and narrative.

By creating awareness and understanding about the process of becoming pregnant, we hope to prevent these false assumptions from being made, and thereby remove a major barrier standing in the way of EBC's acceptance as a viable contraceptive method.

3.
To replace both the terms 'The Morning After Pill' and 'Emergency Contraception' in the public vernacular with the term 'Emergency Birth Control'.
The Morning After Pill is a misnomer, since EBC pills can be taken up to three days after intercourse, and its use perpetuates misunderstanding and diminishes the perceived value of EBC as a contraceptive option.

Emergency Contraception, the established medical term, is accurate but erudite. Many young women, particularly those among high-risk populations, are not familiar with the term contraception although they are perfectly aware of birth control.

Using the more familiar term of birth control in place of contraception is in line with the goal to communicate effectively to the target audience outlined above.

Furthermore, as part of creating awareness we feel it is important to stress the fact that EBC pills contain the same drugs and take the same biological action as regular birth control pills. Referring to them both with the same term will help solidify this connection in people's minds. This should serve to allay misplaced fears that EBC is abortive and help to usher in EBC pills as a socially and morally acceptable contraceptive method.

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