Would you give birth in a midwifery led unit?

[Smoke Jaguar]

Hygiene practices actually play a bigger part in reducing the mortality rates, and even then women still die from infections in hospitals.
I'll tell you what, if I was in a hospital and monitored throughout my labour just in case there was a complication, I'd most definitely end up with a complication or two! You dont' think a medicalised, highly procedural environment would raise my heart rate, raise my stress levels, increase my adrenalin production, have me automatically feel there was something to fear and thereby take birthing right out of my body and into the hands of someone else? You reckon this has nothing to do with the cascade of interventions??
Doctors are great...when they are needed. It would be great if they could just merely observe normal pregnancy and birth, but because of the 'system' they see you in a medicalised environment (as opposed to in your own home) which is governed by policies that do not see the individual birthing women as top priority. Just the way it is. It's not the doctors themselves I don't trust, it's the system they are bound by.
I will never buy that births should all happen in a hospital, 'just in case'. 'Cascade of Interventions' is a phrase we don't hear often enough because we're taught that all interventions are for our own and our babies' good...which is not always true, as we know anecdotally and from personal experience here on BB etc.
A GF had a baby at home this week.In a hospital she would have had interventions - she would have taken too long to labour and the baby would have been too big for her to birth naturally (she probably would have suddenly had an incompetent cervix or some such justification for a 'just in case' intervention) because her baby was a 10 pounder. Both are doing very well - she had midwives and a doula. I just don't buy that she played Russian Roulette :P
Statistics are not my saviour (though sometimes convenient!), instinct is, and midwives have this, on top of skill, people-skills, experience and truckloads of knowledge
ETA: Giving birth in rice paddies is such a furphy!! A tiny bit of research will lead you to the practice of women in the community taking mother and baby into a safe environment, where she stays for about 40 days to establish breastfeeding, bonding, and maternal nutrition, as well as being completely nurtured herself. This happens in quite a few cultures, from Asia, Middle East and Central America. Rice paddies, my @rse!