Is homebirth safe?

The most recent studies have shown that with healthy pregnancies free of complications, planned home births attended by trained midwives are as safe as hospital births.

There are some VERY important distinctions made in the above statement. Studies of home birth look at:

1. Low Risk women
2. Families who have planned ahead of time to have their birth at home and prepared for it. This does NOT include births that happened so fast that paramedics were called or mom delivered at home alone.
3. Home births attended by trained professional midwives.

These studies make no claim as to the safety of unassisted home birth, precipitous home birth or home birth for women who do not meet the criteria for being low risk.

Please note the overall findings of a study on home birth reported in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, including some very important benefits of home birth:

“there were fewer interventions during labour, including electronic fetal monitoring, induction of labour, episiotomy and cesarean section; women were more likely to have an intact perineum and fewer maternal infections and were no more likely to have third-degree or fourth-degree tears or postpartum hemorrhage; and there were no significant differences in perinatal mortality, 5-minute Apgar scores and meconium aspiration syndrome, as compared with women intending to deliver in hospital who were assisted by physicians or midwives.”

– Régis Blais, Are home births safe? CMAJ 2002;166(3):335-6

There is a wealth of information available on this subject:

Check out our articles & research section.