Jon Barrett is accustomed to dealing with anxious mothers-to-be. As chief of maternal-fetal medicine at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, one of the main concerns he hears from patients involves unnecessary medical interventions during delivery.
He acknowledges that the rate of Caesarian sections and episiotomies is far too high in Canadian hospitals. “A healthy young woman, coming into this hospital now for delivery, has almost a 40 per cent chance of having some sort of intervention that is not desired.” But he’s more unnerved by what that phenomenon appears to be triggering: a surge in demand for home births.
In Ontario, midwives performed 2,360 home births in fiscal 2008, an increase of 23 per cent in just five years. There are no national home birth statistics but the percentage of non-hospital births more than tripled in Canada between 1991 and 2007 (the latest year for which statistics are available), although they remain well under two per cent of total births. That rate is typical of much of Western Europe and the U.S.; the notable exception is the Netherlands, where roughly a third of women give birth at home.
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Afternoon Updates:
Typical … we have no real data to back it up but we think you should be afraid anyway.