I believe in choice. If you want a natural birth, a induced vaginal birth, a c-sec, whatever, who am I to tell you what you should have? But as much as I shouldn't be telling you, neither should a medical professional.
This is a purely anecdotal example but when I went to a public hospital antenatal classes with my first three kids, nearly no one talked about having a c-sec. But at my antenatal class at a private hospital for my youngest son, where everyone spent the first 10 mins of the class comparing which ob they had, 9 of the 10 women there were going to have c-secs (guess who the 1 who wasn't was. :p ). Only one of the them said it was elective for no medical reason. The rest were told their hips were too small, or their babies were in the wrong position, or they had GD so their baby would be too big, or they had a c-sec previously so they had to have one now. Why were these women apparently more at risk than a woman who was going to a public hospital?
Making the risks of c-secs known is not the same as the pitchfork brigade that seem to go after homebirth advocates every time a home birth goes wrong. It's about telling women that they need to take those risks into account when deciding if their hips are in fact too small (I mean, seriously?). Similarly I remember saying in my antenatal class that the pressure of going through the birth canal helps push fluid out of the baby's lungs, and that seemed to be news to 3/4 of the women there. Why isn't this stuff told to us more?
If you are informed, you make your choices knowing all the risks and accepting them, be it for home birth or c-sec or anything in between. That's all I would like for women, to know what they're going into.
