New NICE guidelines encouraging homebirth - would you consider it?

[LocalEditorOxford]

Don't know if you've seen the news yet this morning, but the new guidelines from NICE - the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence - say a home birth may be just as safe for low-risk pregnancies.

Hospital labour wards with doctors should be for difficult cases, it says.
BBC news item here

Perhaps it's just the area I live in, but homebirth seems to be more common in Oxfordshire than elsewhere and I was wondering if you had had a homebirth or whether you would consider one bearing in mind these new guidelines?

Would just love to have a discussion on this really. What do you think?

Birth is sadly only ever uneventful in retrospect and is one area where previous lack of risk history is not necessarily a good indication of future risk. Therefore at best you will not ever be certain that things will work out safely. It depends I suppose on whether you are able to take this chance depending upon proximity to medical aid and other factors.

I have always wondered in these days of blended families and people having second families by new partners how much you can go by a previous low intervention birth when the Father is a different one?

Bearing in mind that the size of the baby is partly influenced by genetics, the idea that your new baby will be similar in size (and therefore as 'easy' to deliver) as the previous ones may go out of the window. Yet so much risk assessment is predicated upon the last pregnancy when in fact there may be huge differences in circumstances, health, social circumstances etc.

And where are the midwives going to come from? You cannot leave a labouring woman with a birth companion and a buzzer to press which is what happens in clinics. There aren't enough MWs to support even a 5% increase in HD's.