Home Birth Facts
Prenatal Routine Visits
Did you know the average time an OB provider spends seeing you at a routine prenatal appointment is 7 minutes!
My routine prenatal visit time is 60 minutes, just imagine the relationship we can create together and what we can accomplish in empowerment through education in that time.
The quality of provider interaction is a major risk factor for birth trauma, invest in your experience and feel cared for and heard by who attends you and your family during this pivotal time.
Maternal and Infant Outcomes
Many studies worldwide have documented that planned home births with skilled midwives have outcomes at least as good, if not better than those in the hospital. Many European countries, where midwives are the norm, have much better maternal and infant outcomes than us. In other countries, OBs care for high risk women because they are surgeons and physicians and that’s where their skill set is needed. We do not need surgeons attending normal physiologic vaginal birth. We need midwives or at least people who trust birth and who recognize birth as a normal process that almost all of the time does not need to be interfered with.
Maternal Mortality
The U.S. spends the most money per capita on OB care in the world, but ranks 55th in maternal deaths. Its maternal mortality rate and glaring disparities continue to rise consistently, despite all the money being spent to “keep us safe.”
Fewer Birth Interventions and Neonatal Outcomes
In 2020, The Lancet published a systematic review and meta analysis (which means they looked at 16 studies that had already been published that provided data from about 500,000 intended home births) and found:
No reported maternal deaths
Women were less likely to experience: c-section, operative delivery, epidural analgesia, episiotomy, 3rd or 4th degree tears, oxytocin augmentation, and maternal infection (Reitsma et al., 2020).
Rates of postpartum hemorrhage for home birth was also less likely or did not differ from hospital birth depending on the study (Reitsma et al., 2020).
Their interpretation of the data was “Among low-risk women, those intending to give birth at home experienced fewer birth interventions and untoward maternal outcomes. These findings along with earlier work reporting neonatal outcomes inform families, health care providers and policy makers around the safety of intended home births” (Reitsma et al., 2020).
Prior to this review in 2020, The Lancet had already published the findings of their “systematic review and meta-analysis with respect to infant outcomes and reported no increase in perinatal or neonatal mortality or morbidity when birth was planned at home compared to hospital” (Reitsma et al., 2020).
Planned Home Birth Attended by a Registered Midwife
Janssen et al. study (2009), looked at all planned home births attended by registered midwives from Jan. 1, 2000, to Dec. 31, 2004, in British Columbia, Canada. They found (yes this is an old study, but it’s here to prove a point we have known this for a long time):
“The rate of perinatal death per 1000 births was 0.35 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.00–1.03) in the group of planned home births; the rate in the group of planned hospital births was 0.57 (95% CI 0.00–1.43) among women attended by a midwife and 0.64 (95% CI 0.00–1.56) among those attended by a physician.”
“Newborns in the home-birth group were less likely than those in the midwife-attended hospital-birth group to require resuscitation at birth”
“Planned home birth attended by a registered midwife was associated with very low and comparable rates of perinatal death and reduced rates of obstetric interventions and other adverse perinatal outcomes compared with planned hospital birth attended by a midwife or physician.”
The average price of a hospital birth in Texas is $17,738
The average cost of hospital birth in Texas is 17, 738. Yes, insurance will cover some of that, but usually most of us are still left paying thousands of dollars in deductibles and copays. The average out of pocket cost with insurance is approximately 3,000.