Women's Decision-Making And Factors Affecting Their Choice Of ...

priority and it is a travesty of rational thought to pretend that value-free decisions
are taken.
Risk perception in childbirth may similarly be influenced by the way
information is presented by caregivers as well as by the interests and cultures of
those concerned. For example, women looked after by obstetric consultants may
tend to view childbirth as pathological and may be more likely to accept that they
need interventions during labour. Those cared for by midwives, on the other
hand, may tend to see childbirth as a natural process (Howell-White 1997).
Additionally, it is also proposed that women are unlikely to consider the risk or
safety of an option that is not explicitly made available to them.
In social psychology research, attention has been drawn to a number of
key aspects of what was referred to as heuristics (Denscombe 1993; Slovic,
Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein 1980; Thaler 1983), which reveal that perceptions of
the extent of risk are crucially affected by a number of factors. The factors
include fear of the severity of the damage that could result from the incident if it
were to happen, called the dread factor. The dread factor strongly influences how
people perceive the level of risk posed by a specific threat. For example, lay
people regard potential global catastrophes such as nuclear accidents as more of a
risk than do experts (Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein 1980). This study
hypothesises that in the same way, in childbirth, emergency caesarean section for
conditions such as foetal distress might strongly influence people with regard to
where they should have their baby. This might be especially true for women who
have experienced the complication before, or know someone who experienced it.
The vividness of the risk also affects lay people's perceptions of level of
risk, for instance, people are more likely to regard themselves as at risk where
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