A study carried out in the Netherlands - where ten times as many women give birth at home as in the UK - found that with mothers deemed a low risk a home birth is as safe as being in hospital.
The Royal College of Midwives says a seismic shift is needed in the way maternity care is delivered in order to allow women who want to give birth at home, and who are at low risk of complications, to do so. By the end of this year all women who be able to choose a home birth if it is medically suitable for them, under Government policy.
Currently just three per cent of women in the UK give birth at home whereas in the Netherlands 30 per cent of mothers deliver at home.
Research, published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, carried out on more than 500,000 low risk mothers showed there was no significant difference in deaths of babies or admission to neonatal intensive care units whether they were delivered at home or in hospital.
The analysis was on those who were looked after by midwives in the community and who gave birth between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2006.
Experts here however cautioned against applying the results to the situation in the UK.
Professor Philip Steer, BJOG editor-in-chief said: "It must be noted that maternity services in the Netherlands are set up to meet the demand for home births, transport is good, and distances short if emergency transfer to hospital is needed.
"The same advantages are not available in all places in the UK, so the safety of home birth has to be considered in the context of the availability of local services."
Prof Steer also warned that mothers who opt for a home birth may be different from those wishing to give birth in hospital and this can affect the results as the women were not randomly allocated a home birth or hospital birth. Women who have a home birth tend to already have children and are older.
Louise Silverton, Deputy General Secretary of the Royal College of Midwives, said: "This is a major step forward in showing that home is as safe as hospital, for low risk women giving birth when support services are in place.
"However, to begin providing more homebirths there has to be a seismic shift in the way maternity services are organised.
"The NHS is simply not set up to meet the potential demand for homebirths, because we are still in a culture where the vast majority of births are in hospital. There also has to be a major increase in the number of midwives because they are the people who will be in the homes delivering the babies.
"I hope this research will be reassuring to women who may have concerns about home birth, and to critics who have questioned its safety."
The study, the largest of its kind so far, found that those who planned a home birth were likely to be older, have a medium to high socio-economic status and have had two or more children already.
Lead researcher Professor Simone Buitendijk, Head of the Child Health Programme at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, (TNO) in Leiden said: "In our research, we studied more than half a million women in primary care and compared planned home births with planned hospital births. The number of babies that died or were admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit was the same in both groups, namely, seven per 1, 000. "We conclude that women can safely choose where they want to give birth, provided the maternity care system is well equipped for homebirths."
A similar study comparing planned home births and hospital births in the UK is underway.
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