Hospitals, with their professional staff and medical equipment, have long been considered the safest place to deliver a child. But for expectant women who get nervous and uncomfortable in staid, solemn maternity wards, there is an alternative: home birth. As long as your preparation is adequate, your home can be as good as, if not better than, the hospital.
Home birth is as safe as hospital birth
A recent study by McMaster University researchers reveals that low-risk women giving birth with the assistance of midwives have positive outcomes regardless of where the delivery takes place.
The findings of the study are published in the Canadian medical journal Birth. It concludes that home birth is as safe as hospital delivery.
Almost 6,700 planned home births in Ontario were assessed in the study. Results indicated that newborns and mothers were no more likely to suffer complications than their counterparts in a clinical setting.
Eileen Hutton, the lead investigator of the study and assistant dean of midwifery at McMaster University, said home birth has been widely debated over the last 40 to 50 years. As expectant women gradually made their way into hospitals without clear evidence that it was the safest place to deliver, home births became more and more discouraged.
Hutton and a team of researchers examined records of women who had planned home or hospital births between 2003 and 2006. They used an electronic database of midwifery care compiled by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care.
