Many women appreciate knowing that the doctor will control the birth with the assistance the doctor deems as the finest tools available to themselves. However, Brodsky goes on to point out that there were many other advances, including sulfur drugs and antibiotics, sanitation and personal hygience, that occurred around the same time period that most women started birthing in hospitals. While I believe home birth to be comparably safe to hospital births, no birth is completely risk free. However, there is a mounting body of evidence that the interventionist attitude prevalent in the medical community today is dangerous. Even the very things that the medical community touts as benefits can actually be harmful.
Drugs often play a role in women choosing a hospital birth.
Doctors have the ability to relieve most of the pain associated with labor. The fear of pain can be a powerful argument for hospital birth. Yet these same drugs can irreperably damage the child or the mother. Oxford University carried out a study called 'The Pregnancy Project'. For ten years a research team of about forty doctors, mathematicians and health experts, headed by Dr Murray Enkin, Professor Emeritus of McMasters University in Ontario, looked at standard hospital births.