HHS HealthBeat (March 29, 2010)

Home births

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

Slightly more babies are being born at home. Marian MacDorman of the National Center for Health Statistics in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that in national survey data.

Only about 1 percent of the nation’s 4.3 million live births in 2006 were born away from a hospital.  Two thirds of those babies were born at home. The percentage of home births increased by 5 percent from 2003 and 4 to 2005 and 6.

MacDorman says home-birth babies were less likely to be low birthweight or preterm:

"Home birth practitioners try to select the lowest risk women as candidates for home birth; and women with higher pregnancy risks are recommended usually for hospital births." (9 seconds)

The study was in the journal National Vital Statistics Reports.

Learn more at hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: November 21, 2011