Research letter

Interest in home and birthing centre delivery and inmidwife care for women at low risk has been growingrecently.1–4 In the past few years in Canada, several provincial governments have legislated midwife care, and other provinces are considering doing so. However, the ap-propriateness of these new models of health care delivery remains controversial.1–9 Although the desire among women at low risk for natural childbirth has been consid-ered a driving force behind the interest in birthing centre and midwife care,1–4 the attitudes of Canadian women to-wards alternative forms of care and the factors affecting those attitudes are largely unknown. As a first attempt to fill this gap, we analysed data from the 1994 National Pop-ulation Health Survey for 3438 women aged 20 to 44 years; at the time of the survey, there were 5 687 000 Canadian women in this age group. The design and methods of the 1994 supplement cycl