IS home birth safe? That depends on where you ask the question.

In much of the developed world, home birth is a fringe practice, at about 2 percent of births or less, for obvious reasons: Childbirth is inherently dangerous, and if an emergency occurs, the baby or even the mother may die. Indeed, in the United States, the switch from home birth to hospital birth over the 20th century was accompanied by a more than 90 percent decrease in neonatal mortality and nearly 99 percent decrease in maternal mortality. Antibiotics, blood banking, safe C-sections and neonatology have combined to change death in childbirth from common to rare.

But there are places in the world where home birth is relatively safe, like the Netherlands, where it is popular at 16 percent of births. And in Canada, where it appears safest of all, several studies have demonstrated that in carefully selected populations, there is no difference between the number of babies who die at home or in the hospital.

In contrast, home birth in the United States is dangerous. The best data on the practice comes from Oregon, which in 2012 started requiring that birth and death certificates include information on where the birth occurred and who attended it. The state’s figures show that that year, the death rate for babies in planned home births with a midwife was about seven times that of births at a hospital.

Many studies of American home birth show that planned home birth with a midwife has a perinatal death rate at least triple that of a comparable hospital birth. (The perinatal death rate refers to the death rate of babies in their last weeks in the womb and first week outside it.)