March 4th, 2010

Reports the Bucks County Courier Times:

Pennsylvania is among the top 10 states with the highest percentage of home births. New Jersey is among the top 10 lowest number of home births.

…

After a gradual decline from 1990 to 2004, the percentage of so-called out-of-hospital births increased 3 percent, considered “significant,” though the numbers still represent only about 1 percent of overall births, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Wednesday.

Most out-of-hospital births in 2006 – nearly 65 percent – occurred in homes, followed by birthing centers (28 percent), “other” (6.2 percent) and a clinic or doctor’s office (1.1 percent), according to the CDC report, which examined out-of-hospital birth trends between 1990 and 2006.

Historically the percentage of out-of-hospital births declined from 44 percent in 1940 to 1 percent in 1969, and has remained about 1 percent for several decades. Of the 4.2 million births in 2006, 38,568 were out of hospital, according to the CDC study.

Out-of-hospital births include births at home, in freestanding birth centers, clinics, doctor’s offices or other locations and reflect unintentional emergency births, though nearly half of the home births the report examined were planned.

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