"It seems to me that the people involved in the making of that film have just as much of a vested interest in making women have a particular type of birth - a "natural" vaginal birth, as they claim that obstetricians do."
You have utterly missed the point of the film and the campaign.
And the language you use says everything about the way you see birth, and the role of health professionals in labour.
They have no interest in making women have any particular type of birth. They simply want a maternity system which enables women who want a physiologically normal birth which doesn't involve emergency surgery or the use of instruments (the type of birth the vast majority of women want) to have one. Our current system simply doesn't optimise women's chance of a healthy, normal birth, which is what it should be doing. In fact it ruins many women's chance of having a straightforward labour. It actively obstructs normal birth.
As far as women's right to have a planned c-section goes where there are no medical indication (including tokophobia) - I agree that this is a problem in our current system in the UK and we need to resolve it. But first we need to resolve the problems that are making our system unsafe and leading to very high rates of emergency surgery, as this is the cause of the greatest amount of emotional trauma and ill health in new mums. And this will only be resolved by increasing the number of midwives and improving access to case-loading midwifery care. If the government decide to increase funding to the point that we can guarantee all women instant access to epidural, and c-section on demand, while ALSO vastly increasing midwife numbers so that women who want a normal birth have a reasonable chance of getting one, then brilliant. But I suspect this isn't going to happen any time soon, and if we have to choose, we need to prioritise safety. Which means that increasing midwife numbers needs to be prioritised ahead of widening access to surgical birth for low risk women.
"I would love to see more choice for birthing women. But I think that needs to encompass ALL types of birth - from unmedicated homebirth, through hospital birth with any pain relief requests made by the mother immediately responded to, to ELCS, and anything else I haven't thought of!"
According to the current evidence (Care Quality Commission (CQC) in 2010) nationally more than 9 out of 10 women 'definitely' (68.9%) or 'to some extent' 27.9%) got the pain relief they wanted. I'm assuming that women who requested an epidural and didn't get one wouldn't answer tick a box that said they 'definitely' or 'to some extent' got the pain relief they wanted. I'm suspect that large number of the women who ticked the 'to some extent' box had pethidine or opioids which didn't work well for them, so perhaps not a situation where they were denied access to pain relief.
And nearly all women in the UK have access to obstetric led births. In fact 9 out of 10 births take place in obstetric led units. It's birth centres which are being shut down, and home birth services (like the one attached to the Homerton) which are being cut. If you want an epidural in a large teaching hospital in the UK you are very likely to get one. On the other hand if you want a birth without the use of instruments, episiotomy or surgery in an environment which supports active birth and water birth - well, bloody tough luck, you're probably not likely to get one!
In other words, the power isn't in the hands of midwives and natural birth advocates. Our current system, even the UK where we have a midwife led system of maternity care, is vastly biased towards medicalised birth, and this is reflected in the ridiculously high rates of emergency surgery that mothers are experiencing in labour.
"medicalised birth = bad, natural birth = good"
Can you explain to me how a birth involving forceps, ventouse, episiotomy and emergency c/s is preferable to a vaginal birth involving none of these things which still ends with a healthy mum and baby? Surgery, augmentation and instrumental birth (which is what we mean by a medicalised birth) ARE bad if they are avoidable!