Please rest assured, it's gory from a female perspective too! :) Suffice to say that if I could UN-know what the Zavanelli manoeuvre is (I googled it after reading the comments) I'd be a slightly happier woman. That aside, I'm no fan of a lot of aspects of modern medicine: the power of the big pharma companies, and the blind faith that causes things like the seroxat tragedy.... but it seems to me that a lot of childbirth complications are mechanical rather than chemical, and therefore having the tools on hand to deal with that makes perfect sense. Though taking an already safely-delivered baby and mum into hospital does seem like the worst of both worlds to me.