Homebirth kills babies.
Homebirth advocates are well aware of this, and they have a convenient fiction at the ready to combat it. It goes something like this:
Sure babies (and mothers) die at homebirth who could have been saved in the hospital, but that’s dwarfed by the number of babies (and mothers) who die because of hospital interventions and would be alive today if they had simply had an unhindered birth at home.
Therefore, I think it is only fair to allow homebirth advocates to list those who died of interventions as a counterpoint to my many posts about the babies and mothers who died because they were far from the hospital.
There must be an extraordinary number of them if the death rate from childbirth interventions exceeds the death rate at homebirth. Homebirth represents less than 1% of US births, so if the death rate in the hospital were higher, there would need to be nearly 100 intervention related deaths for every homebirth death.
If homebirth advocates are correct, we can expect hundreds of comments about thousands of intervention related deaths. That could be humiliating for me.
Of course if they are wrong, that could be humiliating for them.
So have at it homebirth advocates. Here’s your big chance. Let the world know about all those babies and women who die because of childbirth interventions. Tell their stories. Prove your point…
… if you can.
