Hospital Birth Vs Homebirth

Home birth versus hospital birth is one of the more controversial topics in the world today. It is a delicate topic because the safety and well-being of mothers and babies is in question. The majority of the information out there is subjective, making it difficult to reach an unbiased conclusion.

Delivering a baby in the home and in the hospital both provide comfort to some, but homebirth offers decreased cost and hospital births offer more options. Some women have different birthing methods in mind when it comes to delivering a child. Some women feel that it is more convenient to stay home to deliver their child. Mothers-to-be will choose to have a hospital birth because they may feel safer or more secure knowing that if something is not right or if she has had complications, the doctor is there and she is in a hospital and everything will be okay.

The articles included in this review suggest higher risks are associated with home births. Three of the nine articles conclude home births have a higher risk of newborn mortality rates than hospital births (2)(3)(4). Six articles conclude home births have a higher risk of hospital transfer for complications arising from a home birth.

With technological advances, many United States women are turning to home births rather than hospital births. Avoiding unnecessary medical interventions, previous negative experiences, and mistrust of traditional providers are just some of the common reasons why mothers do not choose hospital births (Boutcher, Bennett, McFarlin, & Freeze, 2009). Home births provide an environment that feels familiar and safe and the mother has an increased sense of control. Even though home births have acceptable safety percentages, they are not well supported by the government, society, or insurance companies (Boutcher et al., 2009).

The topic of Home Birth is one that is constantly being debated, researched and talked about. Here I will discuss several aspects of this topic to be thought over for what they are: facts. A home birth is simply giving birth to a child at home rather than in a hospital. There are many benefits when choosing home birth as well as negative consequences. When having a child, many aspects must be acknowledged and well thought over. These include the cost, the location, whether a midwife is necessary or not among other concerns. A midwife is “a person trained to assist women in childbirth.” (Dictionary.com). This knowledge is important in understanding the differences between hospital and home birth as midwives may be present in either situation.

Not many large scale studies of the safety of home birth have been done in North America, perhaps because home birth in the United States and Canada is still considered “fringe” by many. To remedy this, in 2000, authors Kenneth Johnson and Betty-Anne Daviss conducted a large scale prospective study of planned home births in both countries. Few distinctions were made between nulliparous and multiparous women, but because it was the only large-scale study done in the United States, it is included in the review. The North American Registry of Midwives made participation in the study mandatory for recertification, and in the end 409 midwives agreed to participate. Each midwife obtained consent from their patients, who were then tracked through their pregnancies to six weeks post-partum. Data was sent back to the authors every three months. In total, 5418 women were included in the study. All were considered low-risk and planned to deliver at home. Low-risk was defined in this, and the subsequent studies cited, as singleton, vertex births at 37 weeks or more gestation, receiving prenatal care. Of those 5418 women, 655 (12%) were transferred to the hospital intrapartum (83.4%), mainly for failure to progress, pain relief or exhaustion. Following delivery, 1.3% of mothers and 0.7% of infants were transferred, mainly due to maternal hemorrhage or infant respiratory distress. Transfer rates of nulliparous women were four times higher than multiparous women.

For thousands of years women have been delivering babies naturally without pain medications. We have survived as a species for this long this way. We were designed to birth without pain medications, so why is it that today it is more common to use the drugs than to deliver naturally? In this essay I will discuss the different arguments for mothers to consider an all-natural birth experience.

Several studies have been piloted on various facets of Home Birth, centering on the levels of safety, benefits, risks and the impact of place in terms of all-inclusive postpartum care at home. Despite a wealth of evidence accompanying planned home birth as a safe option for women with low risk pregnancies, the setting remains provocative in most high resource countries. Birth is an event of great significance in family life; giving birth at home is a custom in many parts of the world because of inadequate access to health care facilities. Although, pregnancy and delivery are, under healthy conditions, normal social and physiological activities, childbirth has become hospital centered in most industrialized countries. Views are exceptionally polarized in the United States, with interventions and costs of hospital births escalating and midwives involved with home births being denied the ability to assist in mothers’ wishes of birthing at home. According to the Population Reference Bureau 's "2010 World Population Data Sheet" approximately 260 babies are born every minute. Approximately 500,000 pregnant women are laboring in the world on any given day (Population, n.d.). However, for being such a routine experience, as seen above, the event of childbirth holds an ‘anything but common place’ in the life experience of a woman.

Women are now tasked with trying to maintain a balance between a natural and medical childbirth, all while losing and reclaiming control. As Walsh (2010) describes, this type of struggle or rather, ‘dichotomized thinking,’ concerning natural and medical childbirth, leads women feeling a sense of uncertainty and stress. Specifically, within western society, women are losing trust in the birthing process and losing their expectations of experiencing a natural birth (Reiger: 2006). The medical model, popular culture, media, and social influences from family or friends, have instilled a belief in which birth is a process to be feared. The fear of birth is perpetuated by medical professionals questioning women’s abilities to give birth on their

The midwives role is not to deliver the baby. Their role is to be a

Two years ago, I was introduced to midwifery when my brother and his girlfriend were considering options for the impending birth of my nephew. Since that time, everything I’ve pursued and studied has helped bring me a step closer to becoming a midwife myself. I find pregnancy, childbirth, and babies to be the most fascinating things in the world. I spend heaps of time independently researching different aspects of childbirth. Last year, I wrote a research paper on the differences between home births and hospital births, and I’m currently working on a podcast about home births and the role midwives play. There's so much knowledge out there that I was oblivious to; once I figured out that pregnancy, birth, and even postpartum care need not be

Do you prefer a home or hospital birth? This is a question most women don’t ponder upon until they are actually pregnant. This research is done on the opinion of those who do not have any children. Home births give parents their own privacy, comfort, but also limit their access to medications and medical professionals. Hospital births provide the parents with the option of pain medications, medications for the baby and emergency caesarian section.

Changes in medicine have not improved child birth. People might say that “physicians [are] most qualified to attend births.”(Leggitt) or that “formula [can] supplement the meager amount of milk”(Behrmann) a woman could produce. However the effects of pain medication, and the lives that could be saved tell a different story.

In the case medicated childbirth vs. a natural birth the danger clearly speaks volumes. Two out of three physicians recommend medicated birth for a child. The simple fact that we have advances in technology that provides us as humans a way of escape from the pains of childbirth should be fully taken advantage of. To have resources and technology so advanced and not use it would be a waste of years of scientific research. More than 2.5 million out of 4 million births a year the mother ops to have an epidural used. Based off of the research of Dr. Ronald Melzack who conducted an experiment to try to measure the pain women experience during the process of childbirth. The scale that he developed to measure the pain is called the McGill pain questionnaire.

Water is at the present time a well-known form of pain relief available to women in all stages of labour (Richmond, 2003). With the majority of hospitals and midwifery led units offering the choice of water for birth and companies willing to sell birth pools to women across the country for use with home births, water birth is perceived by many to be easily accessible (The Royal College of Midwives, 2012). The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has reported in their 2013 survey of maternity services, that 34% of women planned to have a water birth. One interesting finding of the survey was that only 8% achieved this goal (CQC, 2013). Given the large gap between the figures and the current practice in maternity care to promote informed choice in pregnancy and encouraging women to plan their own care including where they will have their baby, the survey has led the student author to explore the reasons why women did not achieve the birth they sought. As shown in Table One, 4% of women were not told why they could not have their chosen pain relief and it was documented that 14% were given ‘other’ reasons, see Table One. However, when reporting the findings they failed to breakdown the figures. This survey (Care Quality Commission, 2013) would have been more useful if they had