Home birth and hospital deliveries: a comparison of the perceived painfulness of parturition.

Cognitive assessments of the amount of pain associated with childbirth by parents electing either homebirth (n = 282) or hospital delivery (n = 191) were compared using Thurstone's univariate scaling method of paired comparisons. Subjects compared the pain of childbirth with 8 other painful events. The hospital birth group rated childbirth pain significantly higher than the homebirth group. In the homebirth group, females considered the pain to be less than the males, and in the hospital birth group, the females rated pain higher than the males.