Small point: Here in the US, midwife services can be great for uncomplicated and (mostly) unmedicated births. However, if you have any complications, you likely need to see an MD really really fast.
Not really. My sister trained as a midwife and there are extremely few cases where an MD could have possibly done a better job than people who spent their entire careers studying pregnancy and birth.
She spent a lot of that time working with poor Amish communities, not the well-off people you probably imagine hire midwives in the US.
I don't see how this is possible. Hospitals can have multiple MD's on site in seconds, perform emergency C-sections, have large amounts of monitoring equipment, and so on.
I looked for some studies, but everything I found was based on poorly designed experiments and aren't worth linking to.
(e.g., excluding all complications after the fact shows similar fetal outcomes, but more cesarians for hospital births; failing to exclude non-credentialed midwives shows more fetal deaths for home birth. Duh?).
It may depend on state, but I thought that c-sections are MDs only. Given that ~30% of all births in the US are via c-section, I wouldn't agree that such cases are rare.
If I were a woman I'd probably rather live in some of those low C-section countries than the high ones. But this is "policy analysis by general country vibes," probably not very accurate, haha.