Home or Hospital: Solid reasons home birth may be better for you and your baby.

Home birth offers a solid start to secure attachment.

When your baby has minimal separation from you, in the first hours following birth, this protects and supports your baby’s full capacity to love and connect with others throughout life. This is easier to achieve at home. Home sweet home is more than an old adage. It is the recognition that we, as domestic beings, feel safe at home. This familiarity and its accompanying sense of safety is one of your greatest allies as you give birth to your child.

Birthing in an environment of familiar sights, sounds, and smells allows you to meet your baby in the space where you feel most at ease and leads to better birth outcomes.

When home birth is an option you can relax knowing that you are free to travel to the hospital or stay home for the delivery depending on what you want and how you feel in labor.

Safe home birth is fully prepared to be safe hospital birth if need be.

Your skilled midwife will help you to know if a hospital transfer is medically advised at any time during your process. Licensed midwives are trained to recognize and appropriately care for complications. Additionally, as an aspect of your prenatal care with. a midwife you can create a birth plan together for a smooth and gentle transition to the hospital if that need arises. These plans help to allay any fear of the unknown. As fear subsides, the safety and security of the possibility for physiologic birth increases.

3. Studies have established the safety of home birth as highlighted below: Research released in 2014 by The Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA), found that among a sample of 17,000 planned home births between 2004-2009:

   • 89.1% of babies were born at home. 10.9% of women transferred to a hospital, either during labor or postpartum.

   • Of those women who transferred to the hospital, 53.2% still had vaginal births. The overall cesarean section rate for this sample was 5.2%, compared to 31% nationally.

   • By far, the most common reason for transfer to the hospital was “failure to progress.” Only a very small proportion of the transfers occurred for urgent reasons, such as fetal distress.

   • 87.0% of women attempting a VBAC were successful in giving birth vaginally. Of those, 94% were completed at home.

   • Under 5% of women in the sample required the use of oxytocin augmentation or epidural anesthesia. This is notably lower than rates reported more broadly in the United States (26% for oxytocin augmentation and 67% for epidural)

   • 97.7% of babies were breastfeeding (at least partially), and 86.0% were breastfeeding exclusively at 6 weeks postpartum. This is an extraordinarily high rate of breastfeeding initiation and continuation, and it is a very important finding to consider in the overall evaluation of the risks and benefits of home birth. Not being breastfed is associated with considerable health consequences to newborns (Stuebe, 2009). These data suggest that home birth is associated with the extremely significant protective factor of maintained breastfeeding.

   • Only 1% of babies required transfer to the hospital after birth, most for non-urgent conditions.

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   • There are so many reasons that people choose home birth. These are just a few to get you started thinking.

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