Unless you have one of dozens (hundreds?) of potential complications that can happen during childbirth and you don't make it to the hospital in time. They you've got a dead or severely brain damaged baby and a potentially dead mom. Totally worth it.

And the odds of making it to the hospital in time if you need an emergency c-section or start bleeding out are pretty slim.

Actually, experienced mid-wives are very good at recognizing problems before they become serious problems. At some point, I was running out of energy and starting to struggle. They have monitoring equipment for the baby, and checked on her first to make sure she was fine. They talked about transporting me, but decided to give me a tablespoon of honey first. It worked, and we were done with a healthy, happy outcome shortly after that.

With midwives, you actually have human attention on you during a birth, rather than doctors and nurses that drop in occasionally and can miss stuff. My hospital birth came closer to having problems because there was another emergency on the floor and no one paid attention to me for hours (when perhaps they should have).

Obviously you haven't done your research on this topic yet. The midwives are state registered and are legally bound to only serve woman who are in perfect health condition, with no complication during pregnancy whatsoever and prefer woman who had previous births without complications. Still, hospital is on standby and yes, it makes more sense if you are not 100 miles away from one.

that's exactly what we did. 12k the hospital, 6k the birthing home and the midwife charged 3k. When we asked her about the price, she "admitted" feeling "guilty". She said "it's still way too high, but I get in trouble from the birthing homes, if I charge less". Talking about "market prices". There are none (yet).