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Re:Immediate skin-to-skin contact with unstable newborns imp... by baby on Thursday May 27, 2021 @06:42PM (#27309499)
Country A infant mortality rate in 2021: 2.86 deaths per 1000 births.

Country B infant mortality rate in 2019: 5.75 deaths per 1000 births.

Guess which country is which.

Re:Immediate skin-to-skin contact with unstable newborns imp... by vlovich123 on Thursday May 27, 2021 @07:32PM (#27309912)
Intra country results can be challenging as who chooses a home birth & who goes to the hospital is already a likely biased population. Maybe the pregnancy is already known to be an at-risk factor, thus biasing things. Or choosing one vs the other may be a confounding socioeconomic factor.

If it's this hard for intra country comparisons, why would one expect inter country comparisons, where one country has socialized medicine & the other doesn't, to meaningfully reflect the specific policies around child birth vs the larger differences between societies?

I don't know the answer, but I don't think simply comparing mortality rates can be used to conclude "natural home birth is safer".