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Originally Posted by opus123
Freebirth is a direct reaction to the unethical high costs of hospitals and medications.
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Please note that the article above is decribing events in Canada.
In Canada using a hospital for birth is free.
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Originally Posted by tecoyah
One of the things that decided for us....an interesting study;/
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So far, the largest and most complete study on the comparison of hospital birth outcomes to that of homebirth outcomes was done by Dr. Lewis Mehl and associates in 1976. In the study, 1046 homebirths were compared with 1046 hospital births of equivalent populations in the United States. For each home-birth patient, a hospital-birth patient was matched for age, length of gestation, parity (number of pregnancies), risk factor score, education and socio-economic status, race, presentation of the baby and individual major risk factors. The homebirth population also had trained attendants and prenatal care.
The results of this study showed a three times greater likelihood of cesarean operation if a woman gave birth in a hospital instead of at home with the hospital standing by. The hospital population revealed twenty times more use of forceps, twice as much use of oxytocin to accelerate or induce labor, greater incidence of episiotomy (while at the same time having more severe tears in need of major repair). The hospital group showed six times more infant distress in labor, five times more cases of maternal high blood pressure, and three times greater incidence of postpartum hemorrhage. There was four times more infection among the newborn; three times more babies that needed help to begin breathing. While the hospital group had thirty cases of birth injuries, including skull fractures, facial nerve palsies, brachial nerve injuries and severe cephalohematomas, there were no such injuries at home.
The infant death rate of the study was low in both cases and essentially the same. There were no maternal deaths for either home or hospital. The main differences were in the significant improvement of the mother’s and baby’s health if the couple planned a homebirth, and this was true despite the fact that the homebirth statistics of the study included those who began labor at home but ultimately needed to be transferred to the hospital.
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http://www.birthmattersmidwifery.com/safe.htm |
While I am sure that the study was objective and alot of those are good points the description (or summary) of the study is misleading in some areas.
- There was four times more infection among the newborn - this is misleading becuase if the mother is determined to have a certain type of common infection (I can't remember the name - *Remembered and came back to edit: Group B streptococcus) that can be passed to the baby during childbirth then her doctor suggests birht in a hospital becuase she will need to take antibiotics intraveneously during the delivery. In such cases the infection can still be passed on to the child. Becuase women's doctors will suggest hospital deliver in these cases for the reasons I described, this increases the number of women in these types of situation that are using the hopspital therby increasing the number of possible newborn infections. Does this account for the difference, probably not, but I am just trying to point out that it is a little misleading.
- The infant death rate of the study was low in both cases and essentially the same - in this case the sample size is too small to determine this. As mentioned above (first page) if birth death (oxymoron?) rate is 1 in 10,000 nowadays you can really judge with 1000 births in each sample. Maybe bot sample had 1 death. That again is a little misleading.
But yes, the rest is a little disturbing.
But as it says in the summary, there were trained attendants at the homebirths. The article at the begining of this therad is talking about births without any trained attendants.