[kleopullin]

I'm very sorry for your and your family's loss.

In the information age, there are so many irresponsible and incomplete bits supporting this, that or the other in as many superlatives as possible. What can a person do? I thought that VBAC was more dangerous for the mother than the newborn, for a healthy young woman, coupled with even a tiny amount of pressure this could easily lead people to make a decision they were not really comfortable with. The "sheer force of opinion surrounding ... childbirth in general" is astonishing; I agree with you here. The information age is badly curated and gives far too much weight to the inexpert opinion, imh (and non-expert) o. Mothers must give birth naturally, mothers must nurse their infants for x months, fathers must cut the umbilical cord.

All the modern medicine in the world coupled with the power of the information age can't make these decisions for us. Maybe, in the future, machine learning methods can pull relevant information out for people to counter some of the cultural pressures.