HARD disagree. Watch “the business of being born”. We’ve turned a fairly routine extremely biologically conserved process into this insanely traumatic experience.

Husband of a UK doctor here.

first, childbirth is fucking dangerous. Its also unnecessarily painful. In terms of risk[1], the epidural is not the thing thats going to cause "morbidity", its the baby coming out breech or massive internal bleeding.

A non insignificant number of women literally tear themselves a new arsehole when delivering a baby. Yes elective caesarians can carry higher risks, but also might be required to actually deliver a live baby, or save the mother.

THe problem for the statisics is that there is a difference between elective caesarians and emergency once. If you group them together, then you're going to get a higher mortality/morbidity rate, because there’s a reason why it was an emergency

Personally I have no fucking clue why people wouldn't want an epidural. My wife didn't want one the second time because "she wanted to get home quicker" (by a fucking day) it turns out by her own words: "it was way way more painful without the epidural" bear in mind shes a fucking doctor, and a paediatric one at that.

[1] Women of African origin in the UK have worse outcomes in child birth, partly because of the lower uptake in pain relief.

extremely biologically conserved process

This seems just plain wrong. It is not at all extremely biologically conserved.

Pregnancy and birth varies wildly across species. Not conserved. For primates, it's got problems; in humans, pregnancy is an absolute mess. The birth itself is historically one of the most dangerous things a woman can do, and remains not exactly a walk in the park even with the best of modern interventions.

I rather think the problem is that births are inherently traumatic (a whole-ass little human coming out of your crotch isn't exactly all fun and games; there's a reason similar imagery is a common trope in horror movies), and we haven't put nearly enough effort into making them less so.

I'm 99% sure you are a men.

Birth in humans is not a "extremely biologically conserved process". Women bodies are not ready for the size of head of the baby.

Compare this to cows or horses - where the baby is of sizeable size, but goes statistically smoothly.

Why don't you go ahead and give birth then, tell us all about your experience.