Emergency Contraceptive Use among the Female Youth Attending Katabi Health Center III, Entebbe Municipality, Uganda.

Abstract

Background : Emergency contraceptives are a method of family planning that are taken after having unprotected sexual intercourse in order to prevent unwanted pregnancies. There is a high prevalence of teenage pregnancies in Entebbe municipality and there have not been any studies done to assess the low utilization of emergency contraceptives and how many actually use them.

Methods: A well detailed and structured questionnaire was designed for this study and therefore that is how data was collected. There were 33 questions which were consistent which made the data easy to analyze after collection.

Results: Emergency contraceptives use among the female youth was found to be low with only 43% of the 280 using them, the number of unwanted pregnancies was high with 71.1% of the respondents having ever been pregnant and bearing children, the number of sexually active youth was high with 87.5% of the 280 respondents being sexually active and the knowledge about emergency contraceptives was found to be relatively low with only 60.7% of the 280 respondents having knowledge about emergency contraceptives.

Conclusion: Not very many of these sexually active youth know about emergency contraceptives and the role they play in curbing the occurrence of unwanted pregnancies. Therefore a number of recommendations were listed in order to solve this problem. For example involvement of parents and guardians in sexual education, involvement of fellow youth to reach out to their peers just to mention a few.