Study: Home birth as safe as Hospital birth
By Danell Swim
February 26, 2008
Is giving birth at home any more dangerous than giving birth in hospital?Home births are controversial and some people, including doctors, are convinced they’re a riskier option than giving birth in a hospital.
But a growing body of research - including some in B.C. - suggests, when done properly and attended by a midwife, it can be just as safe as delivering in a hospital.
In 2002, Patricia Janssen, a perinatal epidemiologist at UBC, published a study comparing 800 planned home births in B.C. to about 1,300 births in hospital.
The two groups of women were carefully matched, to ensure both involved low-risk pregnancies and women of similar economic backgrounds.
What Janssen found was home births were no more risky, either for women or their babies, than delivering in a hospital.
In fact, the risk of some complications and interventions was actually lower among women who gave birth at home.
And the risk of infection, while small in both cases, was five times higher in hospital: 35 per 1,000 births compared to seven per 1,000 for home births.
Since the 2002 study was published, Janssen and her colleagues have been working on a followup, looking at all 3,000 planned home births in B.C. between 2000 and 2004.
The results have not yet been published.
But Janssen said the data appears to confirm the earlier study: home births in B.C. are no more dangerous than those in hospital.
“What we know… is that planned home birth with a regulated midwife does not carry excess risk compared to a planned hospital birth,” she said.
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