[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

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.

[hedora]

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?).

[Balgair]

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.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

If my sister is to be believed [0] C-sections are over-utilized by hospitals.

[0] I admit there is perhaps some bias here

[bee_rider]

This is a pretty widespread belief, right? Haven't looked into the actual underlying facts.

Looking at C-section rates:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/283123/cesarean-sections...

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.