I presume decent sanitation will be the next thing they go after

DavidTC in reply to dragonfrog says:

The medical industry seems a bit biased towards medical intervention, _especially_ when it comes to births. There’s really no reason to give as many c-sections as we do. Other countries have much less c-sections and just as few, or even fewer, problems.

However, the whole problem behind home births is the risk of complications. I find it rather baffling that we haven’t managed a sane compromise to that yet, where women could give birth in a nice, reasonably environment of their own choosing, at their own pace…located within the walls of a hospital if something goes wrong.

Or something like hospice care, except the end result is supposed to be birth, and moving out, instead of death. Women move in when eight and a half weeks pregnant, it’s sorta like a motel with outside doors and no restricted visiting hours (In fact, the spouse may be expected to move in also), but there is always a doctor there, multiple places for the actual birth, including things like water births, etc…

I honestly don’t understand why women don’t demand this. Instead, activists in the field tend to push for home births and whatnot. Which may be safe 95% of the time, but that last 5% makes people hesitate. If the way it worked was that the 5% could just be wheeled down the hall into an operating room, pretty much everyone would love the setup.

It probably doesn’t exist because of soaring medical costs, actually, and the fact that hospitals seem to exist in some sort of alternate universe where every single thing (Including regular household items.) costs 100 times more than they should.Report

DavidTC in reply to dragonfrog says:

@dragonfrog
Except that, as I said, home births with a qualified midwife, at least in Canada, seem to be safer than hospital births.

‘Safer’ in the sense of success? Or safer in the sense of not needing medical attention? Those aren’t really the same things.

In addition that question, I feel I must defend hospital births by pointing out three things:

Firstly, there are whole classes of births that basically can’t allowed to be home births. Aka, pregnancies with known complications. Which, obviously, are more likely to have medical problems.

Likewise, I’d be interested to know if a home birth that was going okay, but went wrong and required the women being rushed to the hospital, counted as a ‘home birth’ or a ‘hospital birth’.

Hospitals handle all births that are known in advance to be problematic, plus all births that become sufficiently problematic during the birth. Of course those births are ‘less safe’, statistically.

It’s like pointing out that hospitals have incredibly high mortality rates per capita compared to any other location on the planet. Well, yeah, because that’s where they put the people likely to die. Likewise, they put all births there that are going to be problematic, so of course births there are more problematic on average.

And that’s ignoring any sort of selection skew by women. Certain genetic makeup allow easier birth than others, and people whose families (or they previously) had easier births might be self-selecting home births more often. Whereas people whose families (or they previously) had problems during childbirth might be more comfortable in a hospital. Correlation and causality might, in fact, be the other way around for at least some portion of the population…they’re selecting home births because, normally, childbirth is easy for them.

There’s all sorts of possible explanations of what is going on. Having a midwife coach a woman through childbirth in a relaxing environment might, or might not, be part of it. Where this happens might, or might not, be relevant.

OTOH, there’s no reason _not_ to mimic home birth as much as possible, especially if it can be done without creating the specific risks that home birth has. The traditional way to get babies out of women, letting them come out naturally in their own time, as practiced for millions of years, can’t be _that_ wrong.

So, in as many cases as possible, you get the benefit of not being in the building where all the sick people congregate and cough their germs all over the place, while at the same time having the facilities for treating sick people quickly accessible for the tiny percentage of cases where they’re needed…

Yeah, having babies in _hospitals_ seems epicly stupid. (Putting _anyone_ in a hospital who does not have a disease is rather stupid if avoidable.) As does trying to schedule busy doctors to do it.

The obvious solution seems to be to have some sort of live-in childbirth clinic staffed by midwives right next to a hospital. Where there can be ‘home birth’, or at least ‘home-like birth’ (Like I said, women and their spouse should _move in_, like it’s a motel room, well in advance.), without all the problems of hospitals, but with all the benefits of emergency care if needed. As @wagon pointed out, the lack of quick medical care in case something goes wrong is the deal breaker for quite a lot of people.Report

DavidTC in reply to dragonfrog says:

And now that some people have pointed out that this only include perinatal deaths and not neonatal, I went back and read some of the comments on it.

It included a grand total of exactly 7 deaths.

And it included deaths that happen well in advance of actually arriving at the hospital! Read the comment ‘Why include stillbirths before 28 weeks?’

Apparently, if you’ve chosen to have a home birth, your baby is less likely to die before it. (Or, as I pointed out, you’re more likely to be wealthy, and have better health care overall.)

This study is actually near complete nonsense.Report