Just reading through some of the themes of this thread - choices, birth plans, expectations, how realistic those expectations are etc. kicking off a thought that has gone around in my a few times.
Do you think the difficulty some (or many?) women have with the process of 'planning' the details of a birth is that to a certain extend it is an oxymoron - trying to control the uncontrollable? I read some posts that make me kind of feel of sad for the poster, when the language they use seems to say that they really believe they can make a certain type of birth happen if they hope hard enough and research broadly enough, when of course in reality every birth is different and has its own unique twists, turns and risks and we really can't control that roller coaster. To me saying 'I am going to have X birth' is a bit like looking out into the garden and saying 'I am going to make that bird land on that branch'. We can do things that make that bird landing on that branch more likely (cut off all the other branches, put seed out on the branch, keep the cats inside) but at the end of the day the bird does what it wants.

I think I am lucky (maybe? maybe not?) that I am some one who did not go into labour with an expectation that I could control the outcome and control how we got there. But I TOTALLY understand that not all everyone has this perspective - we can control where we live, what we do for work, what car we drive and who we breed with - so why shouldn't we be able to control how the baby greets the world? But it does make me wonder, is it easy for me to own my choices (which I totally do, no hesitations there) because of how I went into it - not trying to control the uncontrollable. Like Fleur says, I didn't choose to get pre-eclampsia and to be induced due to that condition, I didn't choose to have blood pressure so high I was close to passing out and being unconscious during labour, but I did choose to introduce interventions that changed the nature of the labour (which some would call cascade of intervention) and I am very happy with those decisions, I *think* largely because of my expectations of what I could and couldn't control.