On April 8, 2026, sexual wellness retailer Babeland and reproductive health resource Bedsider (a project of Power to Decide) announced a joint awareness campaign aimed at combating sexual and reproductive health misinformation circulating on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. The partnership combines Bedsider's medically-vetted reproductive health content with Babeland's three-decade retail and education footprint, with the goal of pushing accurate contraception, fertility, and pleasure information to audiences increasingly relying on social platforms for information that traditional sex education hasn't covered.

Why It Matters

For sex educators and reproductive health advocates, the partnership is a meaningful private-sector response to the federal funding pullback that has gutted formal sex education infrastructure since 2025. For sexual wellness brands, it's a useful template for how retail can credibly partner with healthcare resources without sliding into either pharma promotion or sales conversion as the primary motive. For the broader category, it's a small but notable counter-signal to the "everything is content" social-platform environment where bad information often outperforms good information on engagement metrics. The campaign won't solve sex education's structural funding crisis, but it adds one more credible voice to the platforms where young people are actually looking.

The campaign cites Power to Decide's 2025 Youth Reproductive Health Survey, which found that more than 20% of young people get birth control information from social media — TikTok (43.4%), Instagram (29.6%), and YouTube (19.3%) leading the platforms. The survey also found that only 45% of respondents could correctly answer 5 of 11 contraception knowledge questions, indicating a meaningful information gap that gets filled by viral creators of varying expertise. Babeland sex expert Lisa Finn captured the campaign's framing in the announcement: "When social media becomes the main resource, it can become a game of telephone where details get skewed or become dangerously wrong." Joely Pritzker of Power to Decide added, "Social media is increasingly the first place people turn for reproductive health information — making it critical to combat misinformation."

The partnership lands in a particularly fraught policy environment for reproductive health communication. Federal funding for evidence-based sexual education programs has been zeroed out in the FY2026 and FY2027 budget proposals — the Trump administration eliminated PREP (Personal Responsibility Education Program) funding and Title X family planning support, as covered separately in this report. State-level age verification laws now restrict access to adult content (and adjacent sexual education content) in 26 states. The cumulative effect is a generation of young people getting their sexual health information from a fragmented, commercially-driven, and often unreliable mix of TikTok creators, Instagram influencers, and corporate wellness brands rather than from formal educators or healthcare providers. Babeland and Bedsider are positioning themselves as a credible alternative — a sex-positive retail brand with educator credentials (Babeland was founded in 1993 specifically as a sex-education-driven retailer) paired with a CDC-funded medical resource (Bedsider has been operating since 2011 under Power to Decide).

The campaign's specific format hasn't been fully disclosed, but EAN Online's coverage indicates short-form social content debunking specific viral myths — pull-out method efficacy, period sex pregnancy risk, fertility window misconceptions, and "natural" alternatives to birth control. Bedsider has been steadily expanding its short-form video content since 2024 (including the expert-led video series launched in mid-2025), and Babeland's social channels carry both product and education content. The partnership effectively pools their respective audiences: Bedsider's healthcare provider trust and Babeland's pleasure-positive credibility.

Sources

Update — 2026-05-05

Initial entry — story first created.