Fear of being labelled promiscuous for carrying condoms is leading Irish women to risk unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, the chairperson of the Crisis Pregnancy Agency, Ms Olive Braiden, said yesterday. Eithne Donnellan, Health Correspondent, reports.
She was speaking as new research commissioned by the agency found that nearly a quarter of people in a national study felt if a woman carried condoms, while not in a relationship, it gave the impression that she was "easy" or "promiscuous".
The question was posed during a survey of more than 3,000 men and women aged 18-45 years. One of the authors, Prof Hannah McGee, said when a similar question was asked during a study in the UK, about 80 per cent of respondents regarded women carrying condoms as engaging in very responsible behaviour.
"So we need to change our attitudes. Contraception is available but attitudinally it's often not available to people," she said.
Why we differ from the UK is uncertain. "I don't know the reasons. They may well be historical. But I think if we are a booming economy within Europe there's no reason why we can't change our attitudes to safe sexual practices in the same way as we have changed our attitudes to drink driving and wearing seat belts," she said.
The Irish Contraception and Crisis Pregnancy (ICCP) Study, conducted by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and the Economic and Social Research Institute, also found that one in 10 sexual encounters by those surveyed in the past year were conducted without using any form of contraception, even though they did not want the encounter to result in pregnancy. Younger age groups - those aged 18 to 25 - were more likely to take these risks.
The main reasons this age group gave for failing to use contraception was because sex was unplanned (58 per cent) or they were drinking alcohol or taking drugs (21 per cent) at the time.
The agency, which was established to reduce the number of crisis pregnancies in the State, is responding to the findings with a TV and cinema advertising campaign aimed at young adults to encourage the use of contraception. The advert states: "You have 350,000 million chances of getting pregnant after unprotected sex. It only takes one sperm. No matter where or when, think contraception."
This is the first time contraception is being openly advertised in the Republic in order to reduce unwanted pregnancies.
Meanwhile, only 54 per cent of those surveyed correctly identified the most fertile time in a woman's menstrual cycle as about half way between periods. Some 35 per cent of women surveyed could not identify when they were most likely to become pregnant during the menstrual cycle. Poor sex education at home and at school was blamed.
The report said education concerning pregnancy risk and decisions about when and how to use contraception, including emergency contraception, is needed. A public debate is also needed, it said, on unprotected sex, contraception, crisis pregnancy and its outcomes.
When asked about their experience of crisis pregnancy, some 28 per cent of women and 23 per cent of men said they had experienced a crisis pregnancy. The vast majority ended in childbirth, but 15 per cent ended in abortion.
A second report, also published by the agency yesterday entitled Understanding how sexually active women think about fertility, sex and motherhood, looked at the experiences of 66 women across the State. All but one indicated they had had unsafe sex at some point. They indicated significant difficulties accessing emergency contraception.
Dr Jo Murphy-Lawless, a sociologist at Trinity College Dublin and one of the authors of the study, said the fact that young women are met with disapproval for carrying condoms "even though young men also want to have sex with them, points to a huge double standard in terms of gender inequality that we really need to overcome".
Her report recommends comprehensive, wide-ranging sex education programmes be put in place, that free condoms be distributed in clubs to increase their usage and that family planning clinics be rebranded.