Educating young men about emergency contraceptive could prevent unwanted pregnancies, Reuters reported.

Researchers found that limited access to effective means of preventing unwanted pregnancies may be driven by the lack of knowledge men have about emergency contraceptives. They reportedly know less about them than young women do, Reuters reported.

 "The big finding in our study is that young men had a lot less knowledge about emergency contraception than the young women that we surveyed, and even among the young women, knowledge wasn't great," Sheree Schrager, a member of the study team, told Reuters,

Emergency contraception prevents pregnancy after unprotected sex or when barrier methods of contraception fail.

Schrager said that about half of women understand basic facts about emergency contraception: "how you get it, how you use it, and the fact that male partners were also able to buy it over-the-counter for their female partners."

"But young men had significantly lower knowledge then the young women did, and this is an opportunity for providers to reach out to young men in the hopes of reaching more young women to use emergency contraception," she said.

Currently, only nine states in the U.S. allow pharmacists to dispense emergency contraception without a prescription under certain conditions, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Unplanned or unwanted pregnancies happen at higher rates in poor communities, and they may result in greater health and economic consequences, the researchers write in The Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care.

For the study, researchers enrolled 101 males and 97 females ages 18 to 25 into the study during 2008 and 2009. 

Most of the vlolunteers were Latino - about 61 percent. Another 13 percent were White and 16 percent were African American. The remaining 6 percent identified themselves as belonging to "other" ethnic groups. 

Researchers found that about 36 percent of sexually experienced young women had used emergency contraception previously, while 18 percent of the sexually experienced males had partners who had used it.

The participants were given questionnaires that included items measuring their knowledge of facts about emergency contraception attitudes about using it. Composite scores were determined from the number of correct answers and ranged from 0 to 4.The women's average score was 2.85, while the men's average score was 1.97.

About half the women and a third of the men knew that emergency contraception was available at pharmacies without a prescription. Only 18 percent of the women and 8 percent of men knew that emergency contraceptives were available to women under the age of 18.

"We also found that the young men and young women were really interested in learning about emergency contraception and other forms of contraception from their primary healthcare providers and so despite the fact they mostly get the knowledge from their friends, in the future they'd much rather be hearing about it from the doctor," Schrager said.

The findings might not apply to all young people, the authors point out.

"These were young people who are receiving medical screenings either because they were enrolled in job corps looking for training and education because they were attending Saban Clinic - a free clinic for young people who don't have money to access other kinds of care," Schrager said.

Schrager said her group's report was targeted to healthcare providers who "may have overlooked young men when thinking about pregnancy prevention in their practices."

"Physicians can do a good job of reaching out to not only to young women who could potentially get pregnant, but to their potential partners and it's another way to reach young women who may have been missed by someone else somewhere along the line," Schrager said.