When a pregnant woman announces that she intends to have her baby at home, surrounded by friends and family, I always have an irresistible impulse to glance down and check if she's wearing sandals. She usually is. Disgraceful stereotyping it may be, but it is impossible to deny that home births are the preserve of homely, principled types who may then go on to breastfeed their child until it goes to secondary school.

This is despite the best-intentioned efforts of the National Childbirth Trust, who appointed the television personality Davina McCall - no sandal-wearer she - as their portentous-sounding Ambassador for Home Birth and got her to gush: “I gave birth to all three of my children at home and it was truly amazing.”

Much as I'm sure we're delighted for Davina, home births in this country are not, shall we say, mainstream. Far from it. When your average hard-working, aspirational woman becomes pregnant, she is no more likely to plan to give birth in her bedroom than she is to forego her maternity pay or ask her partner to video the event and post it on the net.

That's because we're British. We're squeamish. We are hardwired to go to hospital and have our babies there. It's what we do. It's in our modern DNA. We do so because experience tells us it's safe, it's reliable and, apart from anything else, it is a chance to have a rest and let someone else look after the mess for a change. Accordingly, only 2.7 per cent of births in England and Wales are at home. In Scotland the numbers are so small the statisticians don't even have a definitive official category for them, and in Northern Ireland the rate of home birth struggles in at about 0.33 per cent.

Plainly there is something cultural at work here. The figures are cast into startling perspective by research this week from the Netherlands, where around a third of all women choose home births. Here, in the largest study of its kind undertaken, researchers have revealed that women in the “low-risk” category who gave birth at home were just as safe as those who did so in hospital. In other words, home delivery - if we may steal the expression back from the age of internet shopping - is as lacking in danger for the large majority as giving birth in hospital is.

The Dutch say the results should strengthen policies “that encourage low-risk women at the onset of labour to choose their own place of birth” and believe the study has relevance for countries like the UK with a highly developed health infrastructure and well-trained midwives.

One can detect something of a undercurrent here. In the UK, the Government is making noises about home birth becoming more available. In 2002 Wales - the only place to set targets - asked maternity services to aspire to a 10 per cent home-birth rate by 2007 (they're nowhere near it). All government policy and advice literature dutifully puts midwife-supported home birth as the No1 option.

The question, really, is whether this is a road we want to go down: and in particular to be encouraged down it by the Dutch, who one suspects are evangelising. In France and Belgium, it should be pointed out, just like America and most other sensible parts of the developed world, there is a relatively stable home-birth rate of about 0.6 per cent. In other words, women in the Netherlands are at odds with the mass female consensus everywhere else, which is that hospital is where they want to be during childbirth.

So let's stay in the real world. Frankly, it doesn't matter how safe home deliveries are proven to be. It doesn't matter how much the NCT bangs on about the spiritual, emotional and practical virtues of home birth (we all know the guilt they have inflicted on women over breast feeding; ditto the avoidance of Caesareans, in much the same way).

We should resist any pressure to turn childbirth into a fashion. Home births may be fine for the tiny minority that want them - no woman should be denied the choice - but for the vast majority of us the only intelligent, progressive, logical place to give birth is within shouting distance of the benefits of 21st-century medicine. This is not about encouraging the unnecessary medicalisation of a perfectly natural condition, nor is it about losing control to nasty male doctors: this is about quashing the entirely whimsical, perverse idea that we should turn our backs on modern medicine's starring role in safe childbirth.

British women are, on the whole, conventional, sensible, unflamboyant types. We wish to give birth safely and quietly in hospital with as little fuss as possible. How utterly spoilt some women are, how complacent, that they think they can manage without wonderful things like blood transfusions, anaesthetic, surgery, antiseptic techniques and obstetric technology, which, in a century, a blink of an eye for womankind, reduced maternal and infant mortality almost to zero.

If nothing else, we owe it to those millions of women, who over thousands of years died or lost their babies from infection and puerperal fever, from breech births and haemorrhage, to take advantage of every last damn thing a hospital can offer.

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