quote:

The rate of home births in the United States has made a dramatic upturn since 2004, reversing a trend of decline throughout the 1990s, government health officials said Thursday. Births taking place outside of the traditional hospital setting increased 29 percent between 2004 and 2009, from 0.56 percent of all births to 0.72 percent — almost 30,000 births — according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"The increase has been driven by non-Hispanic white women," said lead report author Marian MacDorman, a statistician at CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. "For non-Hispanic white women, home births increased 36 percent."