The rate of death for newborns babies born at home is higher than babies born in hospitals.
A recent study conducted by Dr. Amos Grunebaum, an obstetrician at Weill Cornell Physicians in New York City, and his team indicates that mothers can prevent 75 percent of all neonatal death if they deliver their babies in hospitals rather than at home. Neonatal deaths are those that happen within four weeks of a baby's birth.
Researchers suggest that there is an increasing trend in mothers delivering their babies at home; however, the safety of the practice is widely debated. A study from the Netherlands in 2013 found that women have less complications if they give birth to their baby at home rather than a hospital, provided they have delivered at home before and had low-risk pregnancies.
A 2010 study in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology suggests that babies born at home face a high risk of infant death. A 2012 study of Amish births, which was attended by midwives found a lower rate of complications for mothers, and an equal rate of neonatal death for home births, when compared with hospital births.
The new study by Grunebaum and his team examined birth and death certificates for 14 million babies born at full-term in the U.S. The study considered single babies and twins or triplets.
The researchers found that among deliveries by midwives in hospitals, around 3.1 babies died for every 10,000 births. However, 13.2 deaths were found for every 10,000 births among the babies that midwives delivered at home. The results were even worse for first-time mothers as the death rate increased to 21.9 babies for every 10,000 born at home.
The researchers also pointed out that risk also increased for older women, and also for women who were at 41 weeks of pregnancy.
Unlike in the Netherlands, where all home birth attendants are professionally trained, home birth attendants in the U.S. may be inadequately trained per Grunebaum.
Grunebaum said that home birth attendants in the U.S. do not have firm criteria, which limits them from seeing high-risk patients such as those who are expecting twins and those who have had a prior C-section.
However, even with low-risk patients, home births are still riskier than hospital births as a simple procedure may result in complications and require emergency swiftly.
The latest research did not consider checking the cause of death of babies and the team is planning to follow-up the research to understand in detail why home births are linked to increased death rates.
