My wife and I decided to try for a home birth since she had had basically a perfect pregnancy. It may turn out to be the worst decision we ever made. She ended up in second stage (pushing) for 6 hours due to an awkward presentation and was rushed to hospital in an ambulance. She suffered a pretty bad tear and was seriously traumatised by the whole experience - she still has flashbacks almost a year later.

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.