Leaders of Britain's midwives says there is a concerted backlash by some doctors to be negative about the the benefit of home births. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

A "concerted and calculated" backlash by some doctors is downplaying the benefits of home births and has involved the use of "flawed" evidence to support claims that babies were more likely to die if not born in hospital, the general secretary of the Royal College of Midwives claims today.

Cathy Warwick, who heads the body that represents 38,000 midwives in Britain, has been incensed by a recent paper presented by US academics last month that claimed a home birth carried three times the risk that a baby would die.

It prompted the respected medical journal the Lancet to write, in an editorial, that "women have the right to choose how and where to give birth, but they do not have the right to put their baby at risk".

In an interview with the Guardian, Warwick described the Lancet editorial as "sweeping and misogynistic".

She said midwives now "feel there is a concerted and calculated global attack and backlash against home birth which is being unfairly pilloried by some sectors of the global medical maternity establishment.

"There is a danger that risk during childbirth is presented in a way which is leading women to believe that hospital birth equals a safe birth. It does not. There is no hard and fast guarantee that a woman will have a safer birth in a hospital than at home".

There are concerns globally that midwives, who have long campaigned for mother-friendly births, have lost ground in recent years. Hannah Dahlen, the president of the Australian College of Midwives, backed her counterpart in Britain saying that "intense medical lobbying and strategically released journal articles" had put the profession in Australia "in the hands of the medical profession".

Warwick said there has been a trend for some doctors to cast birth as a "medical problem and not a natural process". Medics refute this saying that home births can only be justified for about a "quarter of pregnant women" and the rising cost of medical litigation, with NHS obstetricians facing half a billion pounds of court fines, has made medics wary of the risks.

Doctors have also voiced concerns that home births, where only midwives are present, can mean women rushed to hospitals if complications arise – and then get stuck in traffic.

drive from www.independent.co.uk