On the other hand, your chances of losing a child in childbirth or dying yourself were much higher then too.
That is due to
science, and most emphatically not due to
doctors nor due to moving the birthing process to
hospitals.
The single biggest factor was the discovery of the concept of
infection, and how to prevent it.
Today, hospitals are the single best place to become infected.
The second-biggest was technically not science, but technology: the forceps. Great invention. Fascinating story (example of how to protect "intellectual property w/o patents and w/o the state).
Science (and technology, like the forceps) lowered the death rate, not doctors. Doctors are just technicians. Nothing more. You could go back in time and hire a million additional doctors in 1850, and would it change the birthing mortality rate? Not really. Maybe a little. Maybe it would raise it. France or somewhere had their death rates go through the roof when maternity wards caught on and before the discovery of infection. Let's have a crowded factory-farm-style birthing factory with six screaming women in each
bed(!!) and one doctor delivers baby after baby all day and never washes his hands! Whee!
Today's hospitals do similarly stupid things. Some of them we'll probably only figure out how stupid they were 20 or 50 years from now (DES, anyone? Want a fetal X-Ray?).
No, modern home birth, far away from the malignant super-bug resistant bacteria that blanket all hospitals and have become irradicable, and with advanced technology just minutes away for backup, should heroic measures be necessary, that is the safest and best way to do it for at least 80% of women (healthy, normal, no C-section, not crazy and wanting an elective C-section...). You take the best elements available, from all sources, from all the knowledge we've acquired throughout history.
If you'd like to read more, you could check out the book
Get Me Out!, a history of child birth. It is not advocating for home birth by any means, but the facts just kind of speak for themselves.