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You can choose to have a baby in your homes but that comes with slightly higher risk of death to the baby but a lower possibility of a C-section, says the recent study of births in Oregon published in New England Journal of Medicine.

However, it is important to note that the overall risk to the baby with regards to hospital births, 2 deaths per 1,000 births v/s 4 deaths per 1,000 home births. "Absolute risk of death is low in all settings - less than half of a percent. ... And in terms of that added risk, we see how someone weighs that as a personal choice," said Jonathan Snowden, an epidemiologist at Oregon Health and Science University who led the study, which analyzed close to 80,000 low-risk births in Oregon between 2012 and 2013, as reported by Sentinel Source.

Women who prefer to give birth outside of the hospital had a very different kind of experience. Very few women had their labors stimulated and a quarter of women who went for hospital delivery had to undergo C-section that adds serious complications to pregnancy in the future. Out-of-hospital births also witnessed increased complications such as neonatal seizures and poor Apgar score, scale to measure the newborn's health. However, the overall risk to the newborn baby remained very low, said New York Times.

It is still rare for the women to give births at home. In 2012, less than 1% women opted for birth at home. But there has been a rise in the home births and it is hard to say how safe or unsafe it is because in U.S., the birth certificates only record where the baby was born. They will count it as a hospital birth if a woman opted for a home birth but had to be shifted to a hospital due to complication or a woman who went into labor at home because she couldn't make it to the hospital will be counted as a home birth, reports Washington Post