Sure, it's totally natural. What is also totally natural is things going seriously wrong during childbirth, with disastrous consequences for the mother and/or child. Historically, a huge number of women and children died during childbirth, or lived in pretty terrible suffering afterwards (see here for an example: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/may/07/n...). Obviously those conditions are exacerbated by primitive living conditions, but that's been the "natural" way pretty much everywhere until very recently in human history. Even here, my wife's gynaecologist said that roughly a third of all women suffer some degree of prolapse from vaginal delivery, and that rate goes up steeply with more children. Our experience confirms that - it's not something that people talk about because the side effects are embarrassing (urinary and faecal incontinence, problems with sex etc), and socially in a lot of the western world it's somewhat frowned upon to discuss anything that's negative about having kids. We received no information about the risk of prolapse during our ante-natal care, including the standard "you're going to have a baby" book they give to everyone here. But my wife refused to participate in the cone of silence and openly discussed it with people, and a lot of women we know personally have prolapses of varying degrees.

Here's a quote from the article I linked:

The differences she and Sarfati found were not small; across the five-year study of more than 244,000 babies, they found those in doctor-led care had lower chances of poor birth outcomes.

This included 55 per cent less chance of oxygen deprivation during delivery, 39 per cent lower odds of neonatal encephalopathy, and 48 per cent less chance of a low Apgar score, a measure of a baby's wellbeing after delivery.

Those are really serious consequences for the kid. We have a friend of a friend here whose daughter suffered oxygen deprivation during birth. She's 4, still doesn't talk, can't walk properly and is generally seriously mentally impaired. It is incredibly distressing for the parents. You mentioned that your friends in doctor-led care had more complicated births, but what would have happened if they didn't have that care? In our ante-natal group of 12 families, in the end 6 of them ended up with c-sections due to delivery difficulties, and none of them regret it in the slightest because at the end of the day their kids are ok.

We initially tried to have a home birth, and when things weren't working we were taken to hospital. Our hospital is literally 5 minutes drive from where we lived, but it took in total 45 minutes from deciding she should go to actually being in a hospital bed. I'm here to tell you that 45 minutes is a really long time when your wife is screaming in pain. I wouldn't recommend a home birth to anyone. I'm really glad it worked out well for you (seriously, I think it's awesome that it all went well), but there is a large degree of luck involved in that. I just don't think the risk is worth it when the potential downside is so huge.

In terms of sources, I don't have any to hand, and in general it's really hard to find good data because they inevitably end up comparing very different things in different circumstances. There was a big article in a national magazine here a while back trying to analyse the data they could find, and broadly speaking they found the risks of a birth requiring some sort of non-emergency intervention and a standard vaginal delivery were different but broadly comparable. e.g. vaginal delivery has a much higher risk of prolapse, but c-sections have a much higher risk of endometriosis. Generally speaking planned (either elective or pre-programmed due to birth risk) c-sections are very safe these days, but emergency ones are much riskier. But that might be because by definition they're used when things are already going really bad. As women get older the risks of vaginal delivery go up considerably, and for women pushing 35-40 the recommendation seems to be to seriously consider an elective c-section if that option is available to you.

Edit: found the article: https://www.noted.co.nz/health/health/trial-of-labour-is-a-c...