There’s No Place Like Home … To Give Birth

A great article by Emily Willingham over on Slate.com After a traumatic hospital experience with the birth of her first child, she chose to birth at home the next time. Professionally she is a developmental biologist and is not one "given to unscientific leaps or to detours away from evidence-based medicine."

Some talking points:

- The CDC (Center for Disease Control) has identified a 29 percent increase in home-birth rates from 2004 to 2009 in the United States

- A large study she sites found that births among first-time mothers were as safe in a midwifery unit as in an obstetric unit

- The same studied said that home births or births in a midwifery unit (the U.K. equivalent of a birthing center) were just as safe as a hospital delivery for women who’d already had a child

- 2010 analysis of 12 studies from six industrialized countries found that planned homebirths with healthy and low-risk mothers carried a 0.2 percent risk of newborn death versus a 0.09 percent risk for in-hospital births, a greater than two-fold increase

- Advocates for gentle births such as Harriet Hall, an OB, call for integrating a “kinder, gentler, less-interventionist midwife approach into a home-like hospital birthing facility” would increase patient satisfaction without sacrificing safety.

- Bottom line "The obvious solution to the controversy is to offer choices that reduce perinatal stress, minimize interventions, and personalize birth—the great appeal of home birth and midwives—while ensuring a safe outcome with well-trained attendants and access to emergency facilities. The absence of options in the United States leaves this solution elusive, especially where hospitals lack a homey, low-stress environment and local midwifery care fails to meet the gold standard. Strange, isn’t it, that our nation, in the 21st century, can’t offer more uniformly safe choices for a low-risk pregnant woman seeking a healthy, low-stress birth for her child … and herself?"


Read the whole article here -
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