Introduction:

To date, heterogeneous conditions continue to arise regarding the delivery environment, from institutionalized birth to home birth.

Objective:

To analyze the situation of home births, the role of the empirical midwife and times of COVID-19 Pandemic in Paraguay: scopes from 2010 to September 2020.

Methods:

A descriptive, cross-sectional and observational study of birth records and the type of personnel who attended them in institutions of the public and private sector, social security, at the household level and in other settings of the country, 2010-2020 period, from the Vital Statistics of the Ministry of Public Health and Social Welfare data.

Results:

In Paraguay, 97.2% of deliveries was attended by health professionals, 2.6% by empirical midwives and 0.2% attended by others, according to each particular scenario in the period from 2010 to 2019. Between January to September 2020 (context of COVID-19) 97.7% of vaginal deliveries was attended by health personnel; 1.9% by empirical midwives who had a leading role during the early phases of the quarantine for the pandemic situation, and 0.3% for others.

Conclusion:

Nowadays, there is not enough safety data and bibliographic contribution to support home birth in our field, because of the health compromise of the mother-child binomial, especially. The primary role of the empirical midwives should be as community actors in charge of informing, educating, and referring maternal health cases to the health services, aiming at institutionalized births.

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