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అందరికి ప్రవేశం

నైరూప్య

Awareness, Utilization and Barriers to Ecp Use: A Study from an Urban Locality

Neetu Purohit and Priyanka Bakhshi

Unintended pregnancy has been associated with unhealthy behaviour before, during and after pregnancy and can adversely affect pregnancy outcomes. Emergency Contraception is a post-coital method of contraception that prevents pregnancy before implantation or fertilization takes place. The objective of this study was to understand whether women are aware of the emergency contraceptive pill in the urban setup. Are the women using ECP and are there any barriers to its use. A quantitative study was carried out in urban areas of Jaipur, Rajasthan among married women in the age group of 18-44 years. Multi stage systematic random sampling was adopted to select the localities, the only criteria being that the number of households should be more than 100, 15 wards were selected in all with a total sample size of 243 women. It was found that awareness of ECP was low among the urban married women as compared to other regular contraceptives. In addition, only about 7 percent of the women who were aware of ECP had ever used it. The women who faced a fear of unwanted pregnancy but did not use ECP identified the greatest barriers to be lack of knowledge of Emergency Contraceptive Pill at the time