Mercurius
Legend
I mean, maayybeee....seems like an uncharitable reading. I think we can accuse Martin with being rather interested/obsessed with torturous things happening to his characters, and he certainly likes to be edgy, but that's just part of the tone of this style of fantasy.It's the exact opposite of shocking. If anything, it's enervating and incredibly predictable. GRRM is 74 years old and still writes like a teenage edgelord.
The basic premise of this series is tragic enough -- it's King Lear if Lear was trying to make everyone happy, rather than being a raging narcissist. We don't need to keep killing women in childbirth to make it dark or a tragedy.
And to be clear, I'm generally not overly attached to "grimdark" (or "grrmdark"), but I think Martin does what he does quite well. And it seems to me that your issue is with grimdark as a whole. It isn't everyone's cuppa.
As for women dying in childbirth, it happened a fair amount during the Middle Ages. Not sure about the actual stats. I personally wouldn't have depicted it twice - seems excessive - but that might be more the decision of the showrunners than GRRM himself. But the ratio isn't unrealistic if you compare it to the number of children born and depicted in the series.