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

Abstract #114711

Marcos Arevalo, MD, MPH and Irit Sinai, PhD. Institute for Reproductive Health, Georgetown University School of Medicine, 4301 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20008, 202-687-1392, arevalom@georgetown.edu

Avoiding pregnancy during the first months postpartum is critical for the health of mother and child, yet many postpartum women do not wish to use modern hormonal or other contraceptive methods. We describe new fertility awareness-based guidelines for postpartum women that provide simple instructions to identify when they should avoid unprotected intercourse to prevent pregnancy. The guidelines are appropriate for women no longer using the Lactational Amenorrhea Method (LAM), until they re-establish cycle regularity postpartum. The guidelines consist of three sets of instructions for the three phases of the early postpartum period: postpartum amenorrhea after LAM no longer applies, the cycle after first menstruation, and subsequent cycles.

A pilot study to establish the efficacy and acceptability of these guidelines is underway in Guatemala and Peru, and will be completed by July 2005. Over 200 women users have been admitted, most still in postpartum amenorrhea. User compliance with the guidelines is high with only initial counseling. The presentation will include a description of the guidelines, the theoretical efficacy of the guidelines based on calculations using a pre-existing data set of postpartum women, and final results from the pilot study. Results of the pilot study to date suggest that the guidelines are very effective in preventing pregnancy, are easy for providers to teach and for users to learn and use, and are acceptable to providers and users.

Learning Objectives: The guidelines for postpartum women are fertility awareness-based instructions that women can follow if they wish to use a simple fertility-awareness based method of family planning to avoid pregnancy after they are no longer eligible to use the Lactational Amenorrhea Method (LAM). At the conclusion of this presentation participants will know

(
• what the postpartum guidelines are; (
• the theoretical basis for the guidelines’ efficacy; and (
• results from a pilot study to test the efficacy and acceptability of the guidelines.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.

Recorded presentation