Giving birth: Scary?

My friend who’s expecting her first baby next year had a talk with me yesterday. She was asking me if is really painful to give birth naturally? If the contraction is painful, she’ll opt for caesarean. She’s extremely scared of the pain.
To me, I think the contraction is bearable. It’s painful, but I tried to think positively that with each contraction, my baby is getting out and I’ll be holding him sooner. But I got epidural since I want to be alert and not exhausted after giving birth. At that time, I just wanted to make breastfeeding successful, and I didn’t want to feel too pain and sore until I knock out after giving birth.
I think with today’s advance technology in medical field, more and more women are getting worried with our motherly ability to give birth. Maybe we’re well informed or scared too much by our mothers’ painful experiences, or we watch too much tv that showed a woman pushing hard and yelling at the same time when giving birth.
Mankind has existed for so long, and before last century, women were giving birth without painkiller, and yet many still survive. Besides, without contraception, they are giving birth almost every year and to a bunch of kids. Why are women today have to think twice before giving birth and so afraid of it? Maybe we have to think about financial ability, our career, health condition, spouse’s readiness, and etc, then only will determine if a baby should come into the world.

Baby is God’s option that the world should go on.

This sentence caught my attention, and I think it’s really true that as women, our lifes are not complete without babies, at least one. So, if we have an option of not going thru the pain like our ancestors, and if financial and physically capable, why don’t we give birth more? Then again, some are also thinking about how babies will change their XO body shapes.