By KT Reporter
There has been an increasing number of women turning up at health facilities with complications associated with abortion, the Ministry of Health has reported.
Though he declined to reveal more details on numbers and what districts are most affected, Dr Richard Mugahi, the Commissioner for Reproductive and Child Health at the Ministry, said they are baffled that many women are still having unwanted and unintended pregnancies even as there have been efforts to increase access to contraceptives.
Mugahi was speaking just before a team of researchers released findings of an annual survey done by Makerere University School of Public Health in conjunction with the Ministry and Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS), showing no change in the number of women adopting the use of modern contraceptives in the last two years.
According to the results of this Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA) survey conducted across selected households across the country between September and December 2024, four in ten women aged between 15 and 49 years reported that their last birth or current pregnancy was unintended within the last 5 years.
Of these, 12% did not want any more children but either had no information, inadequate information or misconceptions about contraceptives.
Dr Simon Kibira, a Senior Lecturer at Makerere University and Co– study lead on the study says they measured and found no improvement in the number of women who received comprehensive counseling when obtaining a birth control method in the last two years, with younger women accounting for the highest percentage of those that didn’t receive any form of counseling. This is yet the same data shows, 24% of adolescents who were in school and 49.6% of their out-of-school colleagues had sex in the last 30 days.
For him, lack of adequate information partly explains why they found that up to 80% of women currently not using a contraceptive didn’t intend to use a method in the next twelve months. Only 19% expressed intention to use.
Reacting to these findings, Peter Ddungu, the Country Director of Marie Stopes Uganda, said this data only calls for a candid discussion by policymakers and experts about contraceptive use and sex. For him, it doesn’t make sense for young girls having sex to be denied contraceptives, but only show up at health facilities with complications related to procuring unsafe abortions.
He worries that if counseling for family planning is not done right, then a lot is bound to go wrong, as it ends in discontinuation and switching, which affects consistent use-URN. Give us feedback on this story through our email: kamwokyatimes@gmail.com
