Knowledge of married Saudi women about emergency contraception: A cross-sectional study

Emergency contraception (EC) are methods of birth control that females may use to prevent pregnancy for up to 5 days after unprotected intercourse. This study aims to assess the knowledge of Saudi married women about EC and find its associated factors.

This cross-sectional analytical study included married Saudi women. The data were collected using a self-administered questionnaire. We used the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 26 for data management and statistical analysis.

The study included 437 women whose average age ± SD was 35 ± 7 years. Homemakers constituted 54% of the respondents. Of all, 41.2% reported that they used EC before and 28.6% acquired their EC knowledge from doctors and pharmacists. The score ranged from 0 to 100, with an average of 26.7 ± 25.3. Younger women showed higher average knowledge scores. Similarly, having more offspring was negatively correlated with EC knowledge. Higher levels of education demonstrated higher average knowledge scores as postgraduates had a higher average than other groups. Women who are employed, had higher monthly family income, had doctors and pharmacists as source of their EC knowledge, previously used EC and recently visited their physician for family planning all demonstrated significantly higher knowledge scores.

According to the results of our study, Saudi married women have a range of low to high knowledge of EC. We advise placing an emphasis on EC during counselling sessions for family planning as well as running educational programmes for women who are of reproductive age.