I have looked at the work of one prominent 'pain for a purpose' advocate, Judith Lothian, in connection to the need to minimise disturbance during labour, @GreenOrangePear.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1595201/
It's in "The Journal of Perinatal Education (Advancing Normal Birth)"
The author is a nurse with a PhD.
She quotes research from 1987 and 1992, hardly cutting edge.
Newton N. The fetus ejection reflex revisited. Birth. 1987;14(2):106–108. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
Newton N, Foshee D, Newton M. Experimental inhibition of labor through environmental disturbance. Obstetrics & Gynecology. 1966;27(3):371–377. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
Odent M. The fetus ejection reflex. Birth. 1987;14(2):104–105. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
Odent M. 1992. The nature of birth and breastfeeding. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing. [Google Scholar]
Here is an excerpt:
Women choose to give birth in hospitals because they believe it is “safer” than birth outside the hospital. In fact, laboring and giving birth in most hospitals create a set of physiologic responses that actually occur when we feel unsafe and unprotected. In the typical hospital environment, women are disturbed at every turn—with machines, intrusions, strangers, and a pervasive lack of privacy. The shadow of “things going terribly wrong at any moment” follows women from one contraction to another. Together, these fears contribute in powerful ways to the release of stress hormones, moving women into an attitude of physiologic fight or flight. On an intellectual level, a woman may believe that the hospital is a safe, protected environment, but her body reacts quite differently. No matter what her head says, her body gets the message loud and clear. Her body responds on a primal, intuitive level, kicking automatically into fight-or-flight mode and dramatically altering the process of labor and birth. In choosing modern medical “safety,” women are stressed physiologically, which makes labor and birth more difficult. The lack of attention to women's inherent need to not be disturbed in the typical hospital environment has set the stage for an almost 27% cesarean rate, the routine use of epidurals in labor, the high rates of augmentation of labor, and the high incidence of instrument deliveries in the United States...
...When the trappings of medical birth—monitors, intravenous needles, hospital beds, and epidurals—fade away, when women are quietly and patiently encouraged and supported in exquisite privacy by friends, family, and professionals who trust birth and trust each woman's inherent ability to give birth, when women stop being “disturbed” in labor, many more women will give birth normally and ecstatically.
This is garbage and the author's bias is very clear.
When monitors are not used or read properly the results can be horrific. When correct interventions are shunned because HCPs have allowed an ideology to guide their decisions, women and babies can and have experienced catastrophic outcomes.
Nobody is advocating women give birth in hospital rooms that are like Grand Central Station or that women be wheeled in and hooked up to machines and offered no explanation or support. But to pooh pooh monitors and pain relief and to shun intervention because it's not natural - no, just no.
My grandmother lost her mother and her baby sister in childbirth when she was two. It was a common occurrence back in 1901, when women gave birth at home attended by the district nurse and maybe a female attendant. Since then, we have developed the means of saving pregnant women's lives and babies' lives, and we have also recognised that women's and babies' lives are worth saving.
Meanwhile there are 'normal birth' advocates (what does that phrase even mean?) bleating about fairy tale scenarios where Good prevails and it all comes right in the end. Sadly, there are trusts which are still mired in the dark days of perinatal death of woman and babies, shrugging shoulders when things go wrong as a direct result of uncritical acceptance of the desirability of 'normal birth' above all else.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871519221001165
Here is a much better article on humanisation of birth.
It is worth noting that wards are not a thing in the vast majority of US hospitals, either antenatally or postnatally. Nobody has to put up with other women's loud, drunk, smelly, or otherwise offensive partners two feet away while in labour or trying to recover after delivery, establish breastfeeding, get up to use the loo, etc.
For the most part, women labour in a private room and recover in a private room, at most a double room. There are private showers and loos ensuite. Also, women who receive pre natal care will have their doctor or midwife attend the birth. The woman and the HCPs of any given practice get to know each other, and records are easily available when delivery is imminent.
How much would it cost to provide private rooms for all in maternity hospitals/wings?