Is home birth safe? Sara Wickham looks at the evidence of home birth safety, including a meta-analysis involving around half a million women and babies.
Is home birth safe?
Tag: hospital birth
More evidence on how to keep birth normal
Evidence-based approaches to determining the onset of active labour, assessing progress of labour and determining dystocia may safely decrease intervention.
Further confirmation of home birth safety
A systematic review and meta-analysis has further confirmed the safety of home birth for healthy women, even if they are having their first baby.
Pondering Domesticity…
My grandmother gave birth to all of her babies at home. There were simply no other options (Lee and Wickham 2000). But by the time her daughters were ready to birth, just a couple of decades later, they were offered…
Why it’s not necessarily about you
We know that many of the caesarean sections that are carried out today aren’t medically warranted. A related concern is that a proportion of these may be being carried out in the interests of profit rather than for the benefit…
Birth centres are a safe option even when transfer is involved
Another study has confirmed that freestanding midwifery units are a safe and reasonable option for mothers and babies and that women who use them are less likely to have a caesarean section, even if transfer is involved (Monk et al…
Eight ways of promoting active birth through bedlessness…
I first published a version of this post on bedlessness in 2013. I had received quite a few positive comments on a post about being womanside and was also spurred on by conversations about how midwives and birth folk can…
The false economy of “busy-ness”
“Place shapes the ability of midwives to “be with” women. In the labour ward, strong cultural norms press midwives to engage in “busy work” while they feel more able to sit quietly with women in primary birth settings. Midwives are…
Quote of the Month (December 2015): stronger advocacy, positive relationality and respect
“[T]he women in this study were often not given their basic rights and dignities in the hospital. Despite the women’s self-education prior to labour, it was rendered useless, especially when their rights to even the most basic forms of consent…
Who is most at risk of caesarean section?
I’m back at my desk preparing to take my Recipes for Normal Birth workshops to Australia and, as ever, I’m searching the recently-published literature for clues and evidence that might help midwives, birth workers and women in their quest to…