Note that hospital deliveries can also have complications. Due to high blood pressure, my wife had to deliver our first child in the hospital[0], and under the care of the hospital, rather than the midwife[1]. She spent 17 hours in labour, and only after pushing for 2 hours did the hospital's midwife discover that the baby was stuck, which I suspect was a serious fuck up; only after I insisted that they figure out how the baby progressed, did they discover it had been stuck this whole time. While the caesarean team was preparing, the hospital's midwife managed to deliver the baby with a pump. My wife spent the next two years walking like an elderly person due to instability of the pelvis. Fortunately she eventually recovered, and she's in a much better condition now, a few weeks after delivering our second child.
[0] I'm Dutch; home births are the standard here. [1] Our second child was delivered in the hospital but under the care of the midwife; home birth was not an option due to the complications with the first pregnancy.
Then getting rushed to hospital takes longer than you'd think - 45 mins end to end for us, and we live in a small town. Once there my wife was assessed for risk, the ob/gyn came about 30 mins later because there didn't seem to be any immediate danger for her, then there's a protocol to be followed before any intervention takes place - it all adds up to a surprisingly long time.
Congratulations on your second child, I'm glad that went well and that your wife has recovered - that's really great.
Basically, there is zero information about this risk ante-natally, so people cannot make informed decisions. If we had had all the information that we have now before the birth, we would have at the very least considered a c-section and probably insisted on one, which is why I recommend everyone investigate it for themselves and consider it.
But better to have too much empathy than too little -- or none at all.
3 months later she suffered a prolapse as a result of the labour. Prolapse is the huge dirty secret of vaginal delivery - one woman in two will suffer some degree of prolapse as a result of childbirth, but probably only one in 5 of those will have it badly enough to have symptoms. But once you have it there's basically no cure and it can be hugely debilitating. My wife has always been very active, when she was younger she was going to try out for the Spanish national handball team, she has always run a lot, and so on. She will never run again, she shouldn't lift any weight at all (not even our daughter), she is basically an invalid by her previous standards. Her sex life has been severely compromised due to nerves in the vaginal wall being crushed - that will never improve either. All this was probably not 100% avoidable but we could have massively improved her odds if we had had access to accurate information ante-natally.
Natural childbirth is the biggest lie we have ever suffered from. If we had known then what we know now she would have had an elective caesarian, and I recommend everyone consider it.