quietlyafraid, I could write reams on the strange, hostile and irrational attitudes I've encountered towards C sections.
Let's start with the whole 'it's not an easy option' attitude - which often goes hand in hand with the completely contradictory accusation that women who have C sections have somehow 'got away' with an easy birth. Then there's the (moral) idea that birth and babies are something which need to be physically hard won - so by 'opting out', you're something less of a mother. Quite where that leaves adoptive parents, I don't know... and those who have epidurals or pethidine, or gas and air, even. I think there's a lingering religious inheritance influencing that school of thought, even if religion and its influence on women's roles isn't explicit.
Then I think there's the whole 'if I've been through it, YOU don't get to opt out' attitude. Very difficult to unpick, this one - you get women who have had very tough VBs, whose anger and sadness about it gets buried in obsessing about other women's birth choices. You typically hear the contradictory 'CS's are very hard/CS's are a cop out' speeches from these women. Often too, they really need to believe that no matter how bad their VB experience was, a CS would have been worse. They won't hear anything to the contrary, because it's too devastating for them. I try very hard to be sensitive to other people - but if asked directly, I will describe my CS as a wonderful experience. Because it was. That's the truth of MY experience. It's astonishing how often that is met with outright disbelief, or hostility that amounts to an accusation of lying.
All of these moral judgements get messily bound up with a bit of fact, a bit of hearsay, a bit of personal emotion which you'd be hard pushed ever to get to the bottom of... And what you get is vicious coercive nonsense.
The NICE revised guidelines are to be welcomed because they do at least attempt to make decisions based on available research and fact. So women cab be WELL INFORMED and able to make a CHOICE.