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I'd have to hunt around for specific statistics, but my educated guess would be - extremely unlikely. However, finding evidence or statstics to back this up (and you all, by now, know how much I like evidence) will be quite difficult.
This has to do with the historical nature of obstetrics in the western world, and while this may sound like I'm going to launch into a bit of a rant, believe me, I'm not - but it will help to understand some things about labour and birth are managed in the obstetric model of care.
Ever since statistics and research about birth has been collected - and we are going back to Victorian England, here - the people who have collected those statistics have been obstetricians. They started collecting statistics and research at a time when women's rights did not exist, when the right to medical care was determined by wealth, and when even the most refined of gentleman doctors would not think twice about the way they treated women. Obstetrics was driven by profit in the early days. Look up obstetric forceps on wikipedia; initially, they were so well protected by their creators that they refused to even use them without a screen erected to prevent anyone else from seeing what they were and copying them.
Our body of research, now, is based on principles that were introduced back then and have been around for so long that they have become accepted as conventional wisdom. They are principles that include things such as: birth is inherently dangerous. Birth should be managed by people trained in surgery. Many births will require some sort of surgical intervention. During a birth, the mother and child should be closely monitored.
Some princples have fallen by the wayside as we have become, in many ways, a more enlightened society. We now accept that women have the right to have their partners, or even signficant others, with them during their birth. We now accept that women have the right to keep their babies with them after they are born, and not be separated from them unnecessarily. We now accept that there is a place in the birth process for the father or chosen partner.
So, when you ask questions about "normal" or "natural" birth and we look for answers we can justify using research or statistics, the problem is that those statistics don't exist; all of the research into obstetrics is based on obstetric principles that were invented in a time where understanding of the birth process was essentially flawed - it treated it as a disease, which it is not. In a way, it is a classical piece of "men are from mars, women are from venus" thinking - men have to solve a problem if it is presented to them. The problem being that women have pain in childbirth. The (at the time, quite possible well-meaning) solution: anaesthetise them, initially with chloroform, since with more modern drugs. The next problem - anaesthetised women find it difficult to stand, to walk, or to balance. The solution: lie them on their back. After all, they are "sick", so to speak - they are having a baby. A new problem - women push for hours and hours and get so exhausted that the baby gets "stuck".
My gut feeling, and this feeling is now being backed up by research into homebirth, the type of birth that is possibly the closest we can get to a "normal" birth, is that the actual incidence of "failure to progress", the medical term for a birth that lasts a sufficiently long time that the mother or baby become dangerously exhausted, is very, very low. Many studies into homebirth reveal that the incidence of transfer due to failure to progress is lower than 1%. And that even when there is a failure to progress that the midwife cannot manage through the means at her disposal, independently practicing midwives recognise this earlier than their hospital-based colleagues and transfer their clients as appropriate.
Once more example that I often use - think of human beings as a race. Other smaller mammals have five or ten young at a time, at each birth, and left unchecked, will give birth once a year from sexual maturity until they reach old age. Larger mammals, like horses and cows, have one young at a time but, once more, left unchecked, will mate every time they go into heat. Humans, on the other hand, can manage their fertility to a degree; and even if they don;t, are only fertile a small number of days each year. And, yet, our population grows exponentially, and continues to outpace most other animals on earth. If our birth process was so fraught with danger; If we really DID need a caesarean for 50% of births (which, by extension, implies that if those births occurred naturally, mother and baby would not have survived) how have we survived as a race? If every single time we give birth we run a 50/50 chance of not surviving, how have we spread to cover the face of the earth?
Food for thought, anyway.
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