Birth Time: Hospital vs. Home

Lena H. Sun:

Most babies in the United States are born on a weekday, with the highest percentages delivered between 8 a.m. to 9 a.m., and from noon to 1 p.m., according to a report published Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics.

That won’t come as too much of a surprise to many pregnant women who had cesarean deliveries. Most births in the United States take place in hospitals. And as C-sections and induced labor have increased during the past few decades, more deliveries take place during the day, to maximize coordination and care with doctors and hospital staff.

But what happens if the baby isn’t born in the hospital, but in the home, where most out-of-hospital births occur? (Less than 2 percent of all U.S. births take place outside the hospital.) Those births were most likely to take place in the wee morning hours between 1 a.m. and 4:59 a.m., the report found.

The reason: mother nature.