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As midwife-assisted home births rise, so too do high-risk births outside hospitals
(www.statnews.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Perinatal mortality is lower overall, but there is a huge selection bias at play. The problem with home births is they are often supervised by people that are underqualified, and even when they aren’t, they are without access to critical equipment, which delays care significantly when escalation is needed.
And while a skilled midwife can handle a lot of obstetric complications, neonatal critical care and resuscitation is a whole other ballgame. At a hospital you can perform a c-section within 10 minutes of recognising it is needed and treat complications, you have a pediatrician on standby and you have an intensivist in-house.
Low-risk pregnancies still result in complications and when they do happen, the outcomes are significantly worse. The vast majority of home birthing deaths are preventable with relative ease in-hospital. And this to me is tragic.
I just had an obstetrics rotation for 3 months and not a single obstetrician in our obstetric hospital had a good opinion of home births.
If you will shell out for elevated comfort during birth, you might as well do so for private care at a hospital, which might be more expensive in the USA, Id imagine, but over here, for the price of hiring an at-home midwife you can have a private midwife, obstetrician and suite at the hospital.