Interesting.
It was in effect a kind of horse home birth that led to disaster due to a comparatively rare complication - if this was a human with a mw or dr present, they would have kept a better eye on the placenta and cord, monitored the foal better during labour, used an aspirator to clear out the lungs, and so on. Few babies die these days as a result of this complication, as I understand it. So the technology's there to prevent disaster a lot of the time, even though mammalian birth processes are comparatively inefficient and often dangerous for the offspring.
However this is not a human, it is a horse. If you are a 'farm' horse, it seems medical attention is more or less denied you, because vets are expensive, and the words 'natural' and 'normal for a farm' are regularly invoked. Nobody monitors your foal's heartbeat, there are no gadgets to sort out obstetric disasters, nobody is on hand to stop the cord snapping if it is a bit short, and if you are lucky they give you the foal to sniff a bit at the end so you know it has died.
Were Queenie a valuable pedigree racehorse, I daresay this would all have ended differently. Instead, Queenie spent a whole year growing a foal to no purpose, a process she doesn't understand because she is a horse. She doesn't understand what labour is either, but next year she's going to have to do all this again. And not because we need Shires to pull ploughs, but rather because we like breeding them and standing them around in farms for kids to pay £3.99 or whatever to look at before they go off for an ice cream.
I hope in my next life I don't come back as a horse. A female one like this, anyway.