Maternal mortality is no joke now or in the past. And even in the West, a significant drop in a mother's chances of dying during or because of childbirth didn't occur until the later 19th century--in part thanks to advances in medical care and sterilization, but also in large part due to increased literacy among midwives (in conjunction with a reading public fascinated by medical texts).

And fear of dying in childbed etched its mark on society, as well. In medieval Western Europe, for example, women brought talismans of St. Margaret of Antioch or scraps of her hagiography (saint-biography) into the room where they would give birth, for protection against their own death.

While there was indeed great reason to be afraid, the available scattered statistics we have for the premodern/early modern era don't backup the idea of childbirth as a runaway cause of death for women, perhaps not even a leading one. I'll bring in an earlier post of mine about maternal mortality in late medieval and early modern Europe:

Studies from the 1970s that looked at English cities produced rates of 2-3%. Forbes and Wilson posited around 3% for London in the late 16th century, extrapolating from records from one hospital that put the mortality rate in live births around 2.3% and adjusting for the addition of stillbirth deaths. Dobbie saw 2.5% for Somerset. In 1986, Schofield's highly influential study reduced the number downward sharply, to 1-1.5%. Schofield brought two innovations. One, he studied rural parish (baptismal/funeral) records. Two, he found what are apparently considered better ways of calculating the impact of stillbirth occurrences on maternal mortality.

Scholfield had actually calculated a rate of 1% (or 10 in 1000) for the rural parishes, but it does seem to be a pattern that maternal mortality was higher in cities than in the country. Why? Cities were dirtier! So with a rate of 1% per birth for the countryside, the higher rate in the cities would raise the overall total a little bit.

Now, why can we trust these statistics for the late Middle Ages?

First, the numbers seem pretty constant over most of the early modern era. (There is some uptick in London in the late 17th century, I think because of increased pollution and dirt). They don't start to fall until rising literacy among midwives coincides with the dissemination of printed manuals of childbirth--midwives had better, more up-to-date training in what to do when things went wrong. So it seems fair to extrapolate backwards a century to ~1400.

Second, Schofield actually worked comparatively between England and Sweden, finding fairly consistent/matching mortality rates. If this is a European trend relating to education of midwives (surgeons were typically brought in only if something was already very seriously wrong and death was likely), as the falling rate towards the end of the early modern era seems to indicate, it was probably rather consistent over medieval Europe. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber calculate a maternal mortality rate of 1.15% for early 15th century Tuscany (Florence and surrounding towns/countryside). Elsewhere, Herlihy has distinguished between a 1-2% rate in cities and 0.5%-1% in rural parishes.

As a final note, it's important to realize that this 1-1.5% mortality rate is per birth. Schofield asserts that the rate probably increased along with the mother's age at childbirth. Overall, scholars usually credit the average woman with 5 pregnancies (although I'm not entirely sure how this was calculated, sorry!), yielding the chances of an individual woman dying in childbirth over her lifetime at around 5-10%.