Home birth advocates often say that hospital birth is clearly unsafe, as the "United States has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world."
The problem is that infant mortality is not how you measure obstetric safety.
Infant mortality includes all deaths from birth to one year of age. This makes it a measure of pediatric care, not the safety of obstetric care.
According to the WHO, the best measure of obstetric care (care during pregnancy, labor, and delivery) is perinatal mortality, which it defines as deaths from the 22nd week of pregnancy to the 7th day of life. And the United States has one of the best perinatal mortality rates in the world, lower than Denmark, the UK, and the Netherlands.
So does the United States really have one of the worst obstetric systems in the world? No. It has one of the best.
.
