Research on the comparative safety
of different birth settings tends to exclude «high - risk» pregnancy; conventional wisdom states that women with «high - risk» pregnancies should plan a hospital birth because they are at higher risk of negative pregnancy outcomes.
The final part of my birth team was a doula, who was instrumental in helping me determine and clarify what was most important to me for my ideal birth, and helped me develop a plan
for different birth settings.
However, in developed countries maternal death is now so rare that it would be very difficult to construct a dataset that would allow a valid comparison of the relative risk of maternal death
in different birth settings.