How does home birth fit into the picture?
That’s a trickier question. The answer is, it depends on who you ask. Studies and papers published by MDs proudly proclaim that home birth is three times more likely to kill babies and mothers than hospital births. Studies done by non-medical affiliated groups and groups with vested interest in home birth show a maternal death rate that is much better than modern hospital births. Studies done in other countries, including studies of US births, report a remarkably low rate of maternal death when home births are attended by trained, licensed midwives. Those figures are consistent with home birth statistics in countries with much lower risks of maternal death than the US, like Sweden and Norway, where most births are attended by midwives and many are conducted in a home setting. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which to believe. All research I could find on the subject agrees that unassisted childbirth or ‘free childbirth’ is extremely dangerous to mother and baby, with an exponentially
