New study published about home births!

Exciting news for home birth advocates like myself. The Journal of Midwifery and Women's Health has just published the largest ever study on US planned home births (almost 17,000 women and their babies). The findings provide some nice concrete statistical data to back up advantages of home births that we in the home birth community have known about for a while now. Hopefully the study will help to inform and inspire more health care providers towards making improvements for the needs and safety of expectant mothers and their babies.

From the study, advantages of home births included:

• lower rates of c-sections
• lower rates of birth assisted by forceps or vacuum
• lower rates of episiotomies
• less need for oxytocin to speed labor
• less use of epidural analgesia
• higher rates of VBACs (vaginal birth after cesarean) than hospital births 
• very small percentage of newborns with low Apgar scores (measure of newborn health in first five minutes following birth)

The full study should be available to read online soon. For now, you can read key findings from the study at the Midwives Alliance North America's website.