With the Duchess of Cambridge apparently lobbying for a home birth (Be it ever so grandiose, there’s no place like home?) and inspiring U.K. women to follow in her wake, it seems relevant to summarize the newest community birth study, a New Zealand study of...
Doctors Discover Miracle Treatment for Ineffective Contractions: Physiologic Care
Italian obstetricians report that replacing standard management of slow labor with a physiologic approach greatly reduced cesarean deliveries and the use of other medical interventions in 1st-time mothers. They conducted a before-and-after study in 419 1st-time...
ACOG Issues New Committee Opinion on Home Birth: Some Things Old, Some Things New
The American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (ACOG) has published a revised and updated Committee Opinion on “Planned Home Birth.” If you read the media reports on it, you would think the new Opinion is “same-old, same-old,” but there are some...
Dueling Statistics: Is Out-of-Hospital Birth Safe?
Popping up all over the internet this past week were the results of a New England Journal of Medicine study of Oregon State statistics finding that planned out-of-hospital birth slightly increases risk of perinatal death but greatly reduces likelihood of cesarean in...
New Study Finds Women Are Safe at Home
The Toronto Star reports on a large study comparing outcomes between 11,493 low-risk Canadian women planning home birth at the onset of labor and a random sample of 11,493 equally low-risk women planning hospital birth, both cared for by the same midwives. To...