U.K. Now Wants Women To Have Their Babies At Home

Britain’s National Institute for Health Care and Excellence recently issued new guidelines recommending women with low-risk pregnancies stay home.

According to the U.K.'s national health service, hospitals are totally cramping ladies' birthing style.

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The NIHCE suggests that up to 45% of births -- those involving low-risk pregnancies -- could actually be safer if moms and babies stayed home. (This is a reversal of the service's previous recommendation that women give birth in hospitals, issued in 2007.) Currently, 9 in 10 British births take place in a hospital.

Safer from whom? Doctors and nurses, as it turns out.

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"The advantage for the mother is that the further they are from an obstetric unit, the less likely they are to be operated on, to have an assisted birth, to receive drugs that they don’t want or don’t need,” NIHCE clinical practice director Mark Baker told NBC News.

So will the U.S. follow behind?

NBC

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists "respects the right of a woman to make a medically informed decision about delivery" but still recommends the hospital as the safest place to deliver, according to this 2011 notice.