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Well, after a good news week with lots of positive stories on homebirth, the AMA et al have come out swinging.
I won't bother reproducing the articles here. But if you're interested in the actual Health Dept study conducted on home births in WA, you can find it HERE.
I think a lot of the recommendations make great sense. How dare women seek out a known caregiver and continuity of care?
Well, I haven't had a chance to read the report that was "leaked" to the AMA, but if it honestly says that homebirths in WA in the specific period they examined had this significantly higher neonatal mortality, than I guess the question we really need to be asking is not "should we ban homebirth in WA" but "why is homebirth in WA so different to homebirth in the rest of the world?"
But always remember, the last report the AMA endorsed about homebirth actually managed to twist the definition significantly enough that it included babies born in hospital as "homebirth", so perhaps not the most trustworthy of sources...
This annoys me so much. The AMA are just focusing on one study and completely ignoring other studies from around the world. The other thing is that the Cochrane Collaboration which provides gold standard evidence based reviews of medical research from around the world even has systematic reviews on their website saying that there is no evidence to suggest that a hospital birth is actually any safer than a home birth. So the AMA just pick and choose what they want to focus on for their own benefit.
Michael - Thats so dodgy that the AMA would twist the definition so that babies born in hospital were considered a home birth - just goes to show, they cant just base major decisions and reviews of health services like this on just one study which can have any form of bias in it.