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Home births - Anybody have any unbiased documentation on stats?
My MIL & grandma are very concerned with my decision to have a home birth. I've done tons of research and I'm very much decided.
There are no birthing centers around for a middle ground delivery. My OBGYN is supportive.
All the individual summary type of information I find is typically biased. Only the very detailed studies seem to go into it with "open eyes".
I have looked on the business of being born's website and didn't get any sources that really have a good summary of the statistics of home vs. hospital births.
Anybody have any information that isn't too technical for my family?
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Re: Home births - Anybody have any unbiased documentation on stats?
https://www.cmaj.ca/content/181/6-7/377.full.pdf
This is a great study with an easy-to-read chart comparing 13,000 births (including every midwife-attended birth that occured in the jurisdiction over a period of years) in three cohorts: homebirths, hospital births with midwives, and hospital births with physicians. All the mothers were low-risk at the onset of labour (no high-risk hospital births to skew the stats) and any emergency hospital transfers stayed in the "homebirth" group, so you get a good picture of what you can expect with a homebirth. Homebirths rated better in virtually every outcome measured, from fewer infant deaths, lower rates of tearing, hemorrhage, infant resuscitation, infection, birth trauma and injury to baby, etc. It was this study that convinced me to have a homebirth (especially since I live in BC, where the study was completed).
Great article!
One note- they excluded births which were induced by oxytocin, because this is not something administered by midwives. I just wonder how much different the physician numbers would have been if that had been included (ie higher rates of c-sections and other interventions).
For some reason I can't open the above link so this may be the same.
https://www.bmj.com/content/330/7505/1416.long
This study is known as the CPM 2000 study. Every CPM in the country had to participate in order to keep their license. It's about as unbiased as you can get with this type of study.
Unfortunately, American medical journals wouldn't publish it. But, the British Medical Journal did! Kinda strange since it was an American study.