There are more than 10,000 live births in the United States every day, a number which has been decreasing approximately 5% every year. But the number of births are not the only birth statistics that are decreasing. A new report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics has discovered that more and more women are rejecting the “traditional” hospital deliveries in favor of home deliveries. While between the years 1990 and 2004 these numbers actually declined, after 2004 they have increased more than 30% and in that year it was 36%. One of he possible reason for this is that the United States now has he second highest infant mortality rate in the industrialized world. There are approximately 4 million live births annually in the US but there are also more than 2 million infants who die within the first 24 hours, which is 30% of all deliveries. According to one study, reported on CNN in 2006, the American infants are 3 times more likely to die during the delivery, or shortly thereafter, than Japanese infants and 2.5 times more likely than infants in Finland, Iceland or Norway.
While the high infant mortality rate is one of the reasons for the sudden jump in home birthing, it is far from the only one. American hospitals, striving for efficiency in order to increase profits, have become baby mills, concerned only with quantity and not with quality. Everything is impersonal, from the hospitals to the strangers who are conducting vaginal exams and privacy is non-existent. Hospitals are even putting deadlines on mothers in labor. If the mother does not dilate a minimum of 1 cm per hour a Cesarean section is ordered, which scars her, in some cases both physically and emotionally.
These unfortunate facts are causing more and more families to elect to use a nurse-midwife for the delivery and the home for the delivery room. The phenomenon is no longer limited to migrants, the poor or minorities. The same study indicated that more and more upper income Caucasian women are electing to deliver at home. American football superstar Tom Brady is an excellent example of this fact. He and his wife, supermodel Giselle Bundchen, planned a home delivery from the time she discovered that she was pregnant.
Americans pay more for health care than any modern nation in the world and for this extra money they should be able to expect at least care that is equal to nations that pay less money. This is no longer true however, if it ever has been. The US spends nearly twice, per capita, on health care than does Norway yet has an infant mortality rate 250% higher than the Scandinavian nation. Infant mortality rates are one of the base measures used in determining the quality of health care in a country because the need is so basic. If they US medical industry cannot keep this number at least competitive with the rest of the industrialized world it might be time to reassess how we provide medical care to our people.