Home births up, driven by natural birth subculture - Yahoo! News

ATLANTA – Home births rose 20 percent over four years, government figures show, reflecting what experts say is a small subculture among white women toward natural birth.

Fewer than 1 percent of U.S. births occur at home. But the proportion is clearly going up, study by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. The new figures are for 2004 to 2008. Home births had been declining from 1990 to 2004.

The increase was driven by white women — 1 in 98 had their babies at home in 2008, the most recent year for which the statistics were available.

Only about 1 in 357 black women give birth at home, and just 1 in 500 Hispanic women do.

"I think there's more of a natural birth subculture going on with white women — an interest in a low-intervention birth in a familiar setting," said the lead author, Marian MacDorman of the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. [...]

Full article at news.yahoo.com

"Exactly how unsafe home births are is a matter of medical controversy, with studies offering conflicting conclusions. And some argue that hospitals present their own dangers of infection and sometimes unnecessary medical interventions.

"The CDC researchers did find that home births involving medical risks became less common from 2004 to 2008. Home births of infants born prematurely fell by 16 percent, so that by 2008 only 6 percent of all home births involved preterm births. That's less than half the percentage in hospitals."

The possibility does exist that women are smart enough to seek medical intervention when it's necessary, and that we have the capacity to discern when that is. Whether or not we're willing to may depend largely upon the consequences we can expect to experience if we've chosen not to toe the socially-acceptable line until such time as that need becomes clear.

Posted via email from Moments of Awareness