The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Costa Rica called on the population to warn about the risks of undergoing a home birth. The Reproductive Health Commission indicates that home births increase the possibility of perinatal mortality.
This position is the result of the analysis and recommendations made by the Commission, which warns that households do not have the proper equipment and medical human resources, paramedical and technical, that allows assisting any emergency that may occurr during the delivery.
Andrés Castillo, President of the College, commented that this was a practice that was done a few years ago for different reasons, for example, the distance from medical centers. However, these conditions have changed and the country maintains a privileged social security system.
A single maternal, fetal or neonatal death due to the adverse conditions of medical care or the place of birth in households justifies that this practice should never be authorized in Costa Rica in such circumstances,”
said Castillo.
There is a worldwide debate over “humanizing” vaginal delivery, promoting the practice, because it claims that there is less medical intervention in out-of-hospital deliveries compared to those that occurr in a medical center, thereby establishing the concept of a more natural birth.
For the members of the Commission, the countries where this variety of birth has been promoted are more developed nations, where the level of medicine as well as other aspects such as road infrastructure, transport systems and even medical ambulatory technology are far superior to those offered by Costa Rica.
The College makes a call to prevent pregnant women from delivering from home, as they seek to reduce the risk of obstetric conditions that are unpredictable, such as amniotic fluid embolism, uterine rupture or massive bleeding, emergencies that do not discriminate between high and low risk births and that even represent the causes of the majority of maternal mortality in hospitals.