ABSTRACT
Models for choice assume that women feel able to exercise their rights and make choices when in fact they remain constrained by the belief that experts know best and to question that knowledge may well result in detrimental outcomes, which can then be directly attributed to the women themselves as bad mothers. Despite the disempowerment that some women clearly experienced, good outcome particularly when women are labelled as abnormal pregnant women and situated as maternity patients acknowledges the experts as playing a heroic role. Choice that is offered in early pregnancy has been illuminated as complex and certainly not the simple concept that is presented to women. Consumerist and feminist discourses play roles in constructing women as desiring the right to make choices about the type of birth experience they want. Women’s accounts throughout have demonstrated the role of societal depictions of motherhood and the standards that women feel compelled to achieve in order to depict themselves as good mothers.
