By Aaron Weiss

Stone Soup, the comic strip drawn by Jan Eliot in Eugene, is featuring a character who decides to have a home birth.

She didn't realize the strips would bring in more than 100 emails from people thanking her for shining a light on the topic.

The AP article on the strip mentions "some figures suggest the percentage of home births is much higher in Oregon," and leaves it at that.

Here at Blog HQ, we don't like "some figures," we like actual numbers, so we pulled up the CDC's VitalStats program and generated this spreadsheet for you (XLS), showing birth facilities by state for 2004.

Nationwide, 0.6% of births happened at home. In Oregon, it was more than twice that rate, 1.6%. Only Vermont, Montana, Alaska, and Pennsylvania had a higher rate of home births.

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