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.

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.

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