Is it because of the whole big head/bipedalism thing? Other mammals can pop out babies in no time and it seems like that would be way more advantageous for multiple reasons (less stress on mom and baby, not in a vulnerable position for hours in the wild, etc). Why does the norm skew towards a day rather than hours?
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You are right about the big head and bipedalism which both makes child birth much harder for humans then other animals. And this would indeed make it quite hazardous for humans to give birth in the wild. Not only would it attract predators but infections are much more likely as well. And even just the exhaustion from the event might prevent someone from gathering food and water to survive and recover.
So human child birth is only possible in an intelligent species with social structures and planning skills. The rest of the family group is needed to protect the mother and child and provide for them during the process. Some of these intelligence traits likely evolved first which favoured people with larger heads capable of standing better as the survivability of complex births went up which again allowed people to be smarter and work better. Even though there are some branches on the evolutionary tree of humans compared to a lot of other animals the evolution have been very straight forward with people being smarter and smarter for every generation. Other animals have just not gotten into this intelligence niche which humans have evolved into.
It is not quite true that humans are the only animal with such complex births though. Although the other animals with such hard births are bred by humans. Some species of cattle and sheep are completely unable to give birth without human intervention.
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