"A women has the right to make an 'informed' choice of how she gives birth. However, if she then 'chooses' an elective, she is obviously not yet 'informed' enough! "
I've come late to this thread. I hope I don't offend anyone with my contribution. Wanted to respond to the above comment about informed choice.
Basically wanted to point out that there's a fair amount of evidence that women who choose to ff are actually often very poorly informed about the possible implications of this choice for themselves and their babies.
I'd be very interested to read research on how women make decisions about CS and what information they're given from different sources. It seems to me that science is throwing up new things all the time about the birth process and breastfeeding which suggest that the choices we make might affect us and our babies in all sorts of subtle, unexpected ways in the short and the long term. Not sure I'd want to pay much attention to these things though if I'd made a decision to go for an elective and bottlefeed.
Would like to add - if all women birthing vaginally had the amount of money spent on them as women birthing operatively, so that they had access to one to one, continuous care throughout pregnancy and birth I bet you'd see half the number of bad outcomes for vaginal births - fewer bad tears, fewer emergency sections, fewer traumatised mums... and then I suppose it would follow that there'd be fewer women requesting elective sections in the first place. Every time I go into hospital I'm just flabberghasted at how women are expected to go into these places and have normal, happy births.
On a personal note - as someone who has had three difficult vaginal births I still find it difficult to imagine wanting a c-section. If you told someone you were having your gall bladder out and having a labrador puppy delivered to your home for you to care for on the same day, they'd think you'd taken leave of your senses. Yet we take it for granted that it's fine for someone to have a c-section, assume responsibility for a fragile newborn and begin breastfeeding all at the same time. No judgement there - but I've had keyhole surgery and remember what that felt like afterwards. I had to send my children to my mums for three days afterwards as I was in so much pain. Certainly felt worse than after all my births - including one forceps birth, one three day labour followed by a pph and one shoulder dystocia with an 11lbs baby. But I appreciate it's not the same for everyone. One mum at my dd's school came in to pick her dd up 4 days after her elective. With the baby in a sling! Yikes. She looked happy enough though. Was probably drugged up to the eyeballs.