NARAL Pro-Choice America recently deployed an innovative Facebook app supporting no-cost birth control and it has achieved its goal.  The Department of Health and Human Services recently announced its decision that health care plans should include FDA-approved contraception at no cost to America's women. 

Plans that begin on August 1, 2012 will be the first to see benefits.  However, the fight continues to ensure that plans in effect before the law was enacted on March 23, 2010 will also receive these benefits.

During NARAL Pro-Choice America's BC4ME campaign, more than 50,000 people contacted the Department of Health and Human Services to petition for no-cost birth control.  Thousands of those people used an interactive Facebook app to communicate. The app conveyed how much one could save in a lifetime with no-cost birth control and allowed users to share what they would do with the savings on their Facebook wall. 

With the app, you can select exactly which person you know for whom you'd like to calculate savings. This could be yourself, a friend, girlfriend, wife, or even your granddaughter.  

You are then able to adjust for age, number of children, and what kind of birth control is used. 

Step 3 then identifies how much you could save once the information about the birth control recpient's information has been entered. Some find they could save the equivalent of a year's worth of groceries while others find they could fund ten years of education in a developing country with the money saved. 

After finding out how much you can save, users then have the ability to post their savings to Facebook along with a custom image, and are then prompted to take action by asking DHS to make no-cost birth control a reality.

It has been a real pleasure for Fission Strategy to help Facebook users see how much they can make a difference in their lives -- especially in these tough times where every penny counts. Working with NARAL Pro-Choice America, Fission Strategy is glad to be involved in advocacy that benefits Americans especially in support of women's preventative healthcare.