blueviolet:

"every single study done (many matched-population studies, and some quite large,) has shown that homebirth with a midwife attending is statistically as safe as hospital birth in terms of mortality"

I know that's what homebirth advocates tell themselves and each other, but like so much of homebirth advocacy, that's not true, either.

First of all, there are very few studies of homebirth. Most involve only a small number of women. The studies conducted by known homebirth advocates (such as Johnson & Daviss, BMJ 2005) CLAIM to show that homebirth is as safe as hospital birth, but they do not. The show that low risk homebirth is as safe as childbirth for women of all risk levels. There is not a single study that shows homebirth to be as safe as hospital birth for women of comparable risk. It is misleading and disingenuous for homebirth advocates to claim otherwise.

According to the recent report of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in the UK (a healthcare watchdog agency), a comprehensive review of the world wide literature on homebirth showed:

"...The quality of evidence available is not as good as it ought to be for such an important health care issue, and most studies have inherent bias. The evidence for standalone midwife led units and home births is of a particularly poor quality.

The only other feature of the studies comparing planned births outside [physician] units is a small difference in perinatal mortality ... Our best broad estimate of the risk is an excess of between 1 death in a 1000 and 1 death in 5000 births. We would not have expected to see this, given that in some of the studies the planned hospital groups were a higher risk population."

Patricia Janssen's study Outcomes of Planned Home Births vs Planned Hospital Births in British Columbia (CMAJ, 2002) is often cited as showing that homebirth is as safe as hospital birth. That is an especially audacious claim considering that the homebirth group had 2 perinatal deaths and the hospital group had none. Most homebirth advocates do not realize that Dr. Janssen publicly retracted her conlusions in a subsequent issue of CMAJ:

"The purpose of our study was not to determine which method of care was better, home vs. hospital, but rather to assess whether, at the 2-year interval, home birth was safe enough to continue to be offered as a choice for women in the context of ongoing evaluation."

Homebirth advocates claim that studies show homebirth to be as safe as hospital birth, but that is simply not true.

blueviolet:

"Numbers never tell the whole story."

Homebirth advocates tend to have minimal understanding of statistics. In addition to not understanding the requirements of statistical analysis, they misunderstand what statistics are. Statistics are not something separate from the truth. Statistics ARE the truth. Statistics are simply the aggregation of lots of personal experiences. Most people want to know the likelihood of various outcomes if they choose to have a homebirth. The ONLY way to estimate that is through compiling the experiences of many people. The experience of any one person is not particularly helpful.

Statistics tell us the chances of various outcomes occuring. They do not tell us what will happen in a particular case. Nothing can tell us in advance what will happen in a particular case. At this point, what all the existing scientific statistics tell us is that there is an excess rate of preventable neonatal death at homebirth compared to hospital birth. I know you don't want to hear that. I know that's not what the homebirth propaganda say, but it is reality.

"it has to do with a scientific understanding of the normal physiological process and what will facilitate it or cause it to become dysfunctional,"

That's not likely to be true, either, since most homebirth advocates are woefully uneducated about childbirth. Most of what they believe that they know isn't actually true. Most homebirth advocates DON'T KNOW that:

childbirth is INHERENTLY dangerous;

childbirth is a leading cause of young women's deaths in all cultures, in all places and at all times;

the single most dangerous day in all 18 years of childhood is the day of birth;

modern obstetrics and neonatology has dropped neonatal mortality 90% and maternal mortality 99% in the last 100 years;

It is only the spectacular success of modern obstetrics that has allowed homebirth advocates to indulge in the fantasy that childbirth is safe.

If you want to have a homebirth, go ahead. You have the right to make that choice. Just don't tell the rest of us that it is as safe as hospital birth, because it is not.

"I am so incredibly proud of myself"

Why? Vaginal delivery is the default mode. 99% of mothers who ever existed have had an unmedicated vaginal delivery (or died trying) and the majority of women who give birth around the world each and every day have an unmedicated vaginal delivery (or die trying). You don't even have to be conscious. I have seen women who are severely brain injured and unconscious have a vaginal delivery.

Essentially anyone can have an unmedicated vaginal delivery. The achievement is if the mother and baby live despite complications. I'm not sure why anyone would believe that having a vaginal delivery without taking every possible step to be sure that the mother and baby live is some sort of "achievement". It is no more of an achievement than having a pregnancy without a miscarriage.

"It led me to do other "unsafe" things like drink organic raw milk despite the FDA warning on the label, not vaccinate my baby"

As you have made clear, this is not about birth, or vaccination, or raw milk; it is about defying authority. If defying authority gives some people a thrill, that's fine for them. Having an unassisted homebirth, drinking raw milk or rejecting vaccines is as praiseworthy as riding a motorcycle without a helmet or smoking cigarettes, and makes just as much sense, which is to say that it makes no sense at all.