In reply to melanie.

I agree, Mel.
But even so there are some pretty important differences between here and there. I would never tell anyone what to do with their child. But generally speaking, women in the US who choose to have their children at home are not malnourished; have not had 4 to 20 children; have pretty hygenic homes; and their homes are generally supplied with clean drinking water for things like handwashing; boiling and sterilization is something one can pretty easily do at home. That's not the case here. Also, midwives in the US tend to be literate, educated, and therefore have a HUGE body of knowledge available to them that midwives here do not. Even in Guatemala, the majority of births do not cause maternal or child mortality. That's the same the world over, BUT we can't ignore the minority, especially if they're dying from things that are painfully easy to prevent with a little education and training. In the U.S., as a retired nurse practitioner (from the US) just told us last week, "You don't let mothers die." In one case she attended a woman was hemorraging and they could not stop the bleeding, so they gave her a full hysterectomy on the spot. So these birthing emergencies do happen in the states, just not as frequently as here. But in both places it's fair to say that the majority of births turn out to be normal.
I'm enough of a skeptic of the insurance companies to say they'd jump at any chance to keep people in the hospital and on meds, so it would be incredibly annoying to me if their declaration to not cover in-home births came to a national decision to outlaw such a thing.
And finally, the biggest irony to me after having written this, was a report I read in the New York Times about two weeks ago regarding the high cost of invitro fertilization and the even higher costs of the medical expenses due to too many couples having twins that caused myriad complications--all with huge price tags. One of the couples interviewed was in their early thirties. She was 32. In the interview it said they'd tried for one year to achieve pregnancy. So that means she had, at most like 84 fertile days. If she'd been on bc for a few years then that number could be significantly be reduced. If she and he knew nothing about how a fertile cycle physically presents itself and they were stressed out about getting pregnant, still less fertile days in a very big calendar. NO wonder it didn't happen! It can take a woman a few years for her menstrual cycle to regulate after discontinuing bc, and that all depends on what kind she was taking. After a year they did invitro, had twins born just under 6 months who barely survived and wracked up millions of dollars in medical bills. And women here are dying after too many births. To me, some things boil down to the possibility that many many Americans are dependent on the illusion that they can control all aspects of things and that instant gratification is a right not a privilege. And all that without really knowing the facts in the first place. Can someone point us to that elusive place called Middle Ground?