Accurate knowledge is the key to making good decisions about one's reproductive health. While counseling is valuable, a single counseling session with a family planning provider usually cannot cover all of the information that a person needs to make an informed choice among family planning methods. Nor should counselors and other front-line health care providers have to bear all the responsibility for seeing that clients are fully informed. Because the mass media also reach continuing family planning users, they can provide important reminders about pill use. In Haiti a billboard advertises Pilplan, a social marketing brand of OCs.
Many people obtain information about OCs from the mass media.
The more women know about the pill, the better they are able to use it. Accurate knowledge is the key to making good reproductive health choices. People obtain much of their information about the pill from the mass media, even though the information is not necessarily designed to aid contraceptive choice and use. Typically, however, information in the mass media is not detailed enough to help people choose a specific family planning method and use it effectively. Because the mass media reach large and diverse audiences, family planning programs can use the media to improve the use of OCs and other contraceptive methods.