Abstract
BackgroundUnintended pregnancy is among the major public health problems that predispose women to maternal death and illness mainly through unsafe abortion and poor maternity care. The level of unintended pregnancy is high in developing countries. Hence, the purpose of this study is to assess the prevalence of unintended pregnancy and the associated factors among pregnant woman attending antenatal care at Gelemso General Hospital, East Ethiopia.MethodsA facility-based cross-sectional study was conducted from January 10 to April 13, 2015 among women who had attended antenatal care at Gelemso General Hospital. A systematic random sampling technique was used to select a sample of 413 participants. Data were collected via face-to-face interview using a structured and pre-tested questionnaire. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were made to check the associations among the variables and to control the confounding factors.ResultsOut of the 413 pregnancies, 112 (27.1 %) were unintended of which 90(21.9 %) were mistimed, and 22(5.2 %) were unwanted. Multivariate analysis revealed that single, divorced/widowed marital statuses, having more than 2 children, and having no awareness of contraception were significantly associated with unintended pregnancy.ConclusionOver a quarter of women had an unintended pregnancy, a rate which is lower than previously reported. Designing and implementing strategies that address contraceptive needs of unmarried, divorced and widowed women, creating awareness of contraceptives at community level and reinforcing postnatal contraceptive counseling to all mothers giving birth at health institution is recommended to reduce the rate of the unintended pregnancy among parous women.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12905-016-0335-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Unintended pregnancy is among the major public health problems that predispose women to maternal death and illness mainly through unsafe abortion and poor maternity care
Analysis of Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data shows that the magnitude of unintended pregnancy in developing countries ranges from 14 % to 62 % of all births
As this study focuses on unintended pregnancy that ended with child birth, finding might not be generalizable to unintended pregnancy that ended with abortion
Summary
Unintended pregnancy is among the major public health problems that predispose women to maternal death and illness mainly through unsafe abortion and poor maternity care. Unintended pregnancy is an important public health problem that predisposes women to maternal deaths and illnesses mainly through unsafe abortions and poor maternity care. It is associated with late initiation and inadequate utilization of antenatal care services [3,4,5,6], maternal depression and anxiety [7,8,9] and smoking and drinking behaviors during pregnancy [5,6,7,8,9,10].
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