For some time now, and motivated largely by the (bad) treatment that many women have received in hospitals, giving birth at home has become an alternative to hospital birth.
Given the obvious difference between the material and human resources available in a health center and those that can be found in a home, there is an ongoing debate about the safety of home births, which is fueled especially at a particular level when a woman announces her intention to have your child at home.
In Babies and more we have been able to read studies that show that giving birth at home is safe, carried out in the Netherlands, where a large percentage of births are domiciliary, and in Canada. But nevertheless, a new study reopens the debate about home birth safety by associating home birth with a significant increase in infant mortalityThe study is actually a meta-analysis (a review of several studies on the same subject) that has been published in the "American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology" conducted at the Maine Medical Center in Portland, and it has been compared the results of 342,056 home deliveries versus 207,551 performed in a hospital.
This analysis offers data that is presupposed, due to the difference in assistance to women, one of them being less interventionist than the other. Home births are associated with less instrumentalization, producing less episiotomies and less epidural anesthesia. These women are also less likely to suffer tears, placental retentions, hemorrhages and infections and babies are less likely to be born prematurely, to be born underweight or to need assisted ventilation at birth.
The data on mortality during the first days are very similar in both groups of parturients. But nevertheless, home births are associated with a higher death rate at birth, being double if babies with congenital problems are not taken into account (if taken into account, mortality is triple). The cause could be problems of respiratory distress at birth or resuscitation.
Despite the data, the authors of the work recognize that the study will not end the controversy that exists on this subject forever.
Personally, I believe that both types of births have advantages and disadvantages and I believe that the fight should not be “instrumentalized hospital delivery against respected home delivery”, but the ideal (in my view) would be to try to get hospital deliveries , where there are more material and human resources, were just as respected and natural as those carried out at home.
