By Christine Herman/For CU-CitizenAccess.org — Home births have increased by more than 50 percent since 2004. But in 22 states, certified professional midwives have to work outside the law to assist women in home birth.
Although doctors and nurse midwives can assist home births, very few of them actually do, leaving many women without a single legal home-birth provider.
Experts discuss what some activists call a home birth crisis in one such state, Illinois.
This story was originally broadcast on Radio Health Journal and was part of Christine Herman’s journalism master’s project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 2014. Visit http://homebirthillinois.com to see more of Herman’s project.