From choosing what to call the baby and how to decorate the nursery, to deciding whether you want a natural birth or not, there are a multitude of decisions to be made during pregnancy.

One of the most important choices is where to have your baby – yet many women aren’t aware they have options, and automatically assume they’ll have a hospital birth. Indeed, a third (34 per cent) of mothers questioned in a new survey by the consumer group Which? said they knew nothing or not much about their birth location choices.

In fact, there are three main birth location choices – hospital, a midwifery-led unit, or home – and the research showed that three-quarters of midwives thought mothers-to-be would benefit from having more information about these options.

The choice is an important one, says the Royal College of Midwives (RCM), because, as well as different mothers feeling more comfortable and relaxed and less anxious in certain settings, which can help speed up labour, there’s less chance of intervention in the birth if it doesn’t happen in hospital.

But there’s more choice of pain relief at a hospital.

In a bid to clearly outline the options, and which are appropriate for each woman’s circumstances, Which? has launched the Which? Birth Choice website (which.co.uk/birth-choice), supported by the RCM.

The free website brings together all the facts about local maternity services and provides women with personalised results based on their preferences, using the answers a woman gives to questions about her pregnancy to show the most suitable options available in her local area.g Midwife and RCM spokesman Denise Linay says a woman’s choice of birth location will be reliant on whether she has a medical condition, or if there are any problems with the pregnancy.

She says a home birth, for example, would be possible for a first baby provided there were no known pre-existing health or pregnancy problems, and it wasn’t a twin pregnancy.

The ‘choice agenda’ has improved in recent years, she says, although the options can vary widely depending on where a woman lives.

And she warns: “Mothers are often reliant on the information they get from their health professionals, and that can sometimes be biased – for example a GP might be very anti-home births, so they may immediately put a mother down to give birth at a hospital obstetric unit.”

But she points out that some expectant mothers might prefer to give birth at home, for example, if they had all the information they needed.