Article on home birth

I still have yet to blog about our decision to give birth at home (I WILL get to it, I promise!), but in the meantime, here's a great article on why someone might choose a planned home birth. I especially like this section:

The ACOG and AMA have both come out against homebirthing, calling it a dangerous trend and referring to it as a “fashionable, trendy, [...] the latest cause célèbre,” and they paint a horrible picture of complications arising in low-risk pregnancies with no warning that cannot be handled anywhere but the hospital.

Despite that, the most thorough study ever done on homebirth safety, Kenneth C Johnson and Betty-Anne Daviss’s Outcomes of planned home births with certified professional midwives: large prospective study in North America, BMJ 2005;330:1416 (18 June), found that the outcomes of planned homebirths for low risk mothers were the same as the outcomes of planned hospital births for low risk mothers, with a significantly lower incident of interventions in the homebirth group.

The Lewis Mehl Study of home and hospital births, which matched couples in each group for age, parity, education, race, and pregnancy/birth risk factors, found the hospital group had 9 times the rate of episiotomies and tearing, 3 times the cesarean rate, 6 times the fetal distress, 2 times the use of oxytocin for induction/augmentation, 9 times the use of analgesia/anesthesia, 5 times the rate of maternal blood pressure increase, 3 times the rate of maternal hemorrhage, 4 times the rate of infection, 20 times the rate of forceps use, and 30 times the rate of birth injuries (including skull fractures and nerve damage).

Breastfeeding success rates are higher and postpartum depression rates are lower for planned homebirths.