ABSTRACT
There is no difficulty in bridging the gulf between the rhetoric of informed choice and the reality of practice, when women choose the choices that health professionals are confident to facilitate and which services are configured to meet. The stories in this book, however, suggest that the choice rhetoric is hollow when women make choices that conflict with the strongly held opinions of health professionals and the comfortable scope of routine clinical practice. There is nothing to suggest in previous chapters that the maternity service and those who work for it hold anything other than the best intentions when providing care for women, but it is nonetheless apparent that best intentions may sometimes be experienced by women as unkind, insensitive and unresponsive to their needs.
