The Contraceptive Knowledge, Practices and Reasons for Failure among Abortion Care Seekers in Hawassa City, Ethiopia

Abstract

Unwanted pregnancy and induced abortion occur in every society and all governments and health care systems face the challenge of providing some elements of abortion care.  Annually, millions of unintended pregnancies occur worldwide and most of them were due to the non-use or the inconsistent or incorrect uses of contraceptive methods. The majority of them end in induced abortions.  The objective of the study was to assess contraceptive knowledge, practice and reasons for failure among abortion seekers in the health institutions of Hawassa city.  Institution based cross-sectional study design supplemented with qualitative data was done. The study subjects were volunteer induced abortion care seekers in randomly selected health facilities in the city. Pretested and structured questionnaire was used to collect the data and data were entered onto a computer   using Epi-info 3.5.1 statistical program then exported to SPSS Windows version 16.0 for further analysis. Binary descriptive statistics and multiple variable regressions were done. The majority of women, 246(91.85%) have awareness about contraceptives. Most of them were aware of pills 215(87.4%) followed by condoms 193(78.5%). The likelihoods of reporting contraceptives use at time of conception was higher among age group 20 -24 (AOR=1.86, 95% CI 1.01, 3.60) and 25-29 (AOR=3.31, 95% CI 1.48, 7.43).  The reporting of the contraceptive use at time of conception was lower among never married (AOR=0.38, 95% CI 0.17, 0.82). Women undergoing repeated abortions were more likely to report using contraceptives at time of conception (AOR=1.8, 95 % CI 1.01, 3.30). The age, length of marriage, history of abortion and history of contraceptive uses were significantly association with intention of contraceptive use in the future.   The majority of women became pregnant due to forgetting to take contraceptive (23.1%) and contraceptive failure (21.3%). The result of this study showed that the majority of respondents were aware of existence of contraceptives. However, there was poor contraceptive usage among abortion care seekers. Generally in abortion, prevention is better than cure; preventive works like highly effective contraceptive services, health education should be generated among risky segment of population.

Keywords: Abortion, Contraceptive, Hawassa City.