“It takes precious minutes for the ambulance to arrive and move the baby,” she says. But “situations that require such immediate care during labor are very rare,” and midwives bring emergency equipment to every birth, including oxygen and medication to stop bleeding.

Experts say women should consider a home birth only if they have a low-risk pregnancy with one fetus, without diabetes or high blood pressure, and if the baby is growing and developing as expected through full-term pregnancy. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) medical group insists that multiple births, babies in breech presentation or births in women who have previously had a cesarean section, should never be performed outside of a hospital.

Not all mothers who have had a home birth meet these criteria. A detailed analysis by Shanna Cox, deputy director for science in the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health, and her colleagues found 35 percent of these women should have been disqualified. These included 17 percent who had diabetes, 20 percent whose babies were small for their gestational age, and 10 percent who were born prematurely (some of these problems overlap).

Deaths of babies in low-risk women who had a planned home birth appear slightly higher than comparable women hospital births, ACOG notes, although both cases are less than one in a thousand. At the same time, women planning a home birth are one-sixth less likely to induce labor and two and a half times less likely to have a cesarean section.

Home births are a good option for low-risk women who have already given birth without incident and live less than 20 minutes from a hospital with a maternity ward, says Jacoba van der Kooy, an obstetrician in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, a country where home births with midwives are common. But health care providers Risk factors overlooked, Their study found that factors such as a fetus that is too small increase the likelihood of health problems or death in the newborn.