Assessment of Awareness and Attitude towards Ethiopian Abortion Law among Public Secondary School Students in Addis Ababa

Deres, Genet (2013) Assessment of Awareness and Attitude towards Ethiopian Abortion Law among Public Secondary School Students in Addis Ababa. Masters thesis, Addis Ababa University.

[img] PDF (Assessment of Awareness and Attitude towards Ethiopian Abortion Law among Public Secondary School Students in Addis Ababa)
Genet.pdf - Accepted Version
Restricted to Repository staff only

Download (472kB) | Request a copy

Abstract

Introduction: Unsafe abortion has been one of the problems of significant public health importance. Although Ethiopia’s abortion law was liberalized to some extent in 2005, women in this country still face major obstacles to access Comprehensive Abortion Care (CAC). Objectives: To measure the awareness and attitude towards Ethiopian abortion law among Public secondary School students in Addis Ababa Methods. A cross-sectional study was conducted between 15 January 2013 to 15April 2013. Four stages sampling procedure was used to collect data from 845 students from three public secondary schools in Addis Ababa. A pre-tested self administered questionnaire was used to collect data. SPSS version 15.0 was used to enter, clean and analyze the data. Frequency distributions of the socio-demographic characteristics and outcome variables were portrayed. Cross-tabulations of socio-demographic variables with the outcome variables with chi - square test were used to determine the overall associations. The cutoff for statistical significance was set at p-value ≤0. 05. Moreover, crude and adjusted odds ratio with their corresponding 95% CI were used to measure the strength of associations between the independent and the outcome variables. Results: Five hundred eighteen (61.3%) of high school students did not have awareness on the revised abortion law. Age, sex, and school name revealed significant differences among their respective sub-groups. Age group ≤18 years had a lower level of awareness than those ≥19 years (Chi-square = 3.868, [AOR (95% CI) = 1.418 (1.0 – 2.011)], P-value = 0.049). Females had a lower level of awareness than males (55.4% Vs 65.4%) (Chi-square = 8.67, [AOR (95% CI)] = 0.656 (0.495 – 0.869)], P-value = 0.003). Among the schools, Abiyot Kirs accounted for the lowest level (29.1%) of awareness (Chi-square = 30.19, P-value = 0.000). About half, 535 (63.5%), of the students had a negative attitude towards safe abortion services. Religion was a single determinant factor for attitude. Protestants and others accounted for 74.4% of a negative attitude compared to 60.2% and 69.5% for Orthodox and Islam (Chi-square = 9.67, P-value = 0.008). Conclusion and recommendation: Awareness of abortion law among public secondary school students in Addis Ababa is very low, and most of the students had a negative attitude towards legalization of abortion services. Age, sex and School were determinant factors for awareness of abortion law while religion was a single factor for attitude. Hence awareness of public secondary school students towards Ethiopian abortion law should be increased by different mechanisms which might include in-school awareness programs, leaflet distribution, and increasing the frequency of information by mass media and newspaper. Ministry of Health should give special attention to consider Public secondary School students in its abortion guideline.

Item Type: Thesis (Masters)
Subjects: R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
Divisions: Africana
Depositing User: Emmanuel Ndorimana
Date Deposited: 29 Jun 2018 09:48
Last Modified: 29 Jun 2018 09:48
URI: http://thesisbank.jhia.ac.ke/id/eprint/6087

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item