Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #106107

Lisa Patel, MPH, Carolina Population Center and Maternal and Child Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Public Health, University Square, 123 West Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC 27516-2524, 9195932986, lispatel@email.unc.edu and Carolyn Tucker Halpern, PhD, Dept. of Maternal & Child Health, School of Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 401 Rosenau Hall, CB# 7445, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7445.

To expand the use of emergency contraception (EC) among adolescents and to inform policies and design programs which target appropriate counseling on contraceptives it is important to describe the characteristics of users of EC and understand which characteristics are more likely to affect the use of EC. The prevalence of pregnancy among adolescents is high in US compared to other industrialized countries. 85% of pregnancies are unintended among adolescents. This high unintended pregnancy rate is due to ineffective use and nonuse of contraceptives. Despite increasing adolescent use of contraceptives, adolescents remain inconsistent contraceptive users. EC is used to prevent pregnancy after unprotected sexual intercourse and can play a critical role in preventing unwanted pregnancy among adolescent females. Descriptive statistics will be presented to describe the characteristics of EC users using data collected from female participants in the third wave of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Univariate, logistic and multinomial logistic regression analyses are conducted to establish which characteristics are associated with use of EC by female adolescents and which characteristics affect the likelihood of use of EC. The dependent variable of interest is: use of EC in the past year. Explanatory variables of interest include age, health insurance status, exposure to media, number of sex acts in the past year, use of contraception in the past year, past history of abortion, and age at first sex. To our knowledge, this study is the first to document the characteristics of EC users utilizing data from a nationally representative survey.

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