New Study on Home Birth is Skewed
By Tine Reese
July 19, 2010All of my birth-obsessed friends on Facebook have been buzzing about a recent home birth study published by the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (AJOG). Everyone, including the Coalition for Improving Maternity Services (CIMS), is outraged that the publishers of the study “accepted a poorly designed and methodologically unsound study in which authors concluded there is a 3-fold increase in neonatal mortality in planned home births compared with planned hospital birth.” You can read CIMS’s full response to the study on their website.
The big problem is that the authors of the study “inexplicably eliminated the only high-quality study of planned homebirths in the U.S. that showed excellent health outcomes for infants and their mothers when attended by certified professional midwives.” Instead they chose to consider questionable and poor-quality studies that included information about unplanned homebirths, those attended by unqualified providers and statistics that included high-risk cases.
A host of organizations, including the American College of Nurse-Midwives, Lamaze International, the Midwives Alliance of North America and CIMS have all put out statements questioning the study’s conclusion and provided data to support their claims to the contrary. So the question I have is, why would anyone want to publish a report that is misleading and untrue?
CIMS believes that “the study was politically motivated to discredit midwives who attend the majority of home births in the U.S. and to discourage legislators from passing increasingly pro-midwife state legislation.” CIMS’ advisor, Dr. Michael C. Klein, a senior scientist at the Child and Family Research Institute in Vancouver and emeritus professor of family practice and pediatrics at the University of British Columbia believes this is “an unabashed attempt to have poor science cover-unsuccessfully-a political agenda. I am very surprised that the [Journal] would publish it, let alone call it ‘Editors Choice’.”
Ah, politics! It seems that as more and more women are choosing to plan a home birth, the medical industry is eager to prove that it is unsafe and stop legislation that gives women in the U.S. the right and opportunity to give birth as they choose. According to the CDC, “the number of women opting to have their babies at home has been increasing since 1990 and rose by 5% in 2005 and remained steady in 2006. This is significant because it marked the first time in 14 years that the percentage of out-of-hospital births increased in the U.S.”
Am I a conspiracy theorist? Not really. I didn’t have either of my babies at home and I don’t think my care providers or the hospital were out to get me. However, I would consider a home birth the next time around, especially now that I have devoured all the information available on the subject. I don’t think that I had enough education about natural birth and home birth the first time I was pregnant to confidently make that decision and go against everything I had ever heard about home birth—mostly that it is unsafe and why wouldn’t I want the best medical technology has to provide. I suspect that a majority of women in the U.S. are in the same boat and I would hate to think that poor journalistic integrity, as is evidenced by this questionable report, might be the reason they wouldn’t explore all of their birth options.
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