Sexual exposure and awareness of emergency contraceptive pills

In India pre-marital sex although is taboo, interplay of multitude of factors exposes adolescent girls to pre-marital sex leading to unwanted pregnancy and further intricacies. Hence, this paper assesses the sexual exposure and awareness of ECP among the never married adolescent girls in India by taking National Family Health Survey 2005-06 (NFHS-3) data. Out of the total sample, 15,320 never married adolescent girls of the age group 15-19 years de jure residents are retained for this study. Levels are found out through percentage distribution; associations are assessed through cross tabulation and logistic regression is applied to find out the determinants. It is found that in India, about 0.6 percent of never married adolescent girls have already experienced sex, out of whom 22.4 percent were active during four weeks prior to the survey. Multi-variate result shows that with the increase in age, probability of having pre-marital sex also increases, whereas with the improvement in household wealth index, probability goes down. Further, pre-marital sexual exposure depends mainly on knowledge of ECP. Overall merely 4.9 percent of adolescent girls are aware of ECP. Age, education, religion and exposure to sexual intercourse exert significant effect on the knowledge of ECP.