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At-home births increased during pandemic, still rare

Last year, home births reached the highest rate since the 1990s.

by Alejandra O’Connell-Domenech

In this photo provided by Mark Godbolt Jr., his wife, Jade Godbolt, nurses her newborn child at their Dallas-area home in October 2022. She and her husband chose a home birth for their third child. Godbolt, 31, says there were no complications and she and her son are doing well. "I believed that my body could do what it was made to do and I wanted to be in the comfort of my home to do that,'' she said. (Mark Godbolt Jr. via AP)

Story at a glance

There were more than 51,000 home births in the United States in 2021, marking a 12 percent increase from the year before, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  

The 2021 number represents the highest home births that have occurred in the country since 1990, according to the report.  

Homebirths have been uncommon in the United States since the 20th century, making up less than 1 percent of all births in the 1990s.  

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The American Academy of Pediatrics does not recommend women have at-home births and instead suggest that expecting mothers deliver their children at a hospital or an accredited birth center.  

Planned home births in the U.S have been linked to a two-to-three-fold increase in infant mortality, according to the AAP.  

But home birth numbers spiked starting in 2019 into the pandemic, peaking in January of last year.  

The percentage of at-home births for women regardless of race increased from 1.03 percent in 2019 to 1.26 percent in 2020 to 1.41 percent in 2021.  

But the rates of change were different for women of different races, the CDC found.  

Black women, who did not consider themselves Latino, had the largest change in at-home births. Home births among Black women increased by 21 percent between 2020 and 2021.  

Out of Black women that gave birth in 2020, 0.68 percent gave birth at home. The following year that percentage grew to 0.82 percent, according to the study. 

But that rate increase between 2020 and 2021 at-home births for Black women is still smaller than what took place between 2019 and 2020. 

Between those two years, the percentage of at-home births for Black women increased 36 percent to 0.50 percent.  

Hispanic women experienced the second largest increase in at-home births last year at 15 percent followed by white women at 10 percent.  

Between 2020 and 2021, the home birth rate for Hispanic women increased from 0.48 percent to 0.55 percent and from 1.87 percent to 2.06 percent for white women, the study found.  

Published on Nov 17,2022

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