Eye-catching initiatives that turn out to be rather less than they appear at first are a stock in trade of election campaigns. So only the wildest optimist would be taken aback by the discovery that the promise earlier this week from the health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, to guarantee every expectant mother the option of a home birth by 2009 - a pledge first made in the 2005 Labour manifesto - is deeply flawed.

As this paper reports elsewhere, it turns out that most health regions have too few midwives for decent one-to-one hospital care. And, from new research, we also learn that the assumption that choice is the first priority for mothers is wrong. In fact what they want, wherever they give birth, is quality care at the time and extended support afterwards. This is more than just an everyday tale of hard cash and harsh realities.

Ms Hewitt insists she has found the funding to ensure that there will be available on demand the two midwives considered necessary for each home birth. Birth at the proposed regional maternity units where medical expertise is to be concentrated should also be available for those at risk or who want sophisticated pain control. Birth at midwife-led maternity units offers a halfway house.

It is an admirable policy, sadly undermined by the many separate battles now being fought to save local maternity units in cash-strapped health authorities - decisions, the health secretary insists, that are made locally. Without national standards of maternity care, it is impossible to pledge choice. Nor is it necessarily the best use of those resources that are available for new mothers - among whom the biggest single cause of death is suicide due to post-natal depression. Readily available support, advice and education would do much more good than home birth.

There has been a long campaign to rescue birth from the automatic hospitalisation that 50 years ago was a logical response to a hideous rate of maternal and neo-natal death. Part of the argument has been the right to the alternative choice of a home birth, or birth at a low-tech midwife-led maternity unit. Yet, apparently unobserved by the campaigners, the most important group remains unconvinced. What all pregnant mothers want is to do the right thing. Above all, they want to protect their baby - access, if necessary, to the best medical care is the dominant concern, followed by good quality care whoever provides it.

Being a good mother is overwhelmingly more important that having a home birth that might expose the baby to risk. This is a subject that is too important to too many people to be the subject of an electoral gambit.