What can be promised, and what cannot
No one can guarantee you a particular birth. Everyone can guarantee you the truth, the question asked first, and being believed.
This is the line the whole section draws, and it is worth stating without hedging.
An expectation of a particular outcome cannot be guaranteed by anyone. Not by your obstetrician, not by your midwife, not by a birth plan, not by a hospital that markets itself on low intervention rates. Labor is not a process anyone controls. A woman can do everything and still need a cesarean. A woman can plan for a cesarean and give birth in a corridor.
An expectation of how you are treated is different, and it is owed to you regardless of how the birth goes. Being told the truth. Being asked before things are done to you. Being believed when you say something is wrong or something hurts. Having your privacy kept. Not being shouted at, threatened, or ignored. Those are not preferences. They are the content of WHO's first recommendation and of ACOG's own statement of what informed consent requires.
There is a reason this distinction has teeth rather than just being polite. In the largest analysis of what predicts trauma after childbirth, a woman's own appraisal of the birth correlated at 0.59, higher than actually having an operative birth at 0.48. And in the review of the expectation gap, what carried the effect was not the deviation from plan itself but guilt during the birth and how the care felt. How you are treated is not the soft part of obstetric care. On the evidence, it is one of the strongest levers anyone has.
So: hold your predictions about events lightly, because nobody can promise them. Hold your expectations about conduct firmly, because those are owed to you whatever the birth turns out to be, and because how you were treated is strongly associated with how you look back on it. What actually happens matters as well. This section has shown that too: among women having a first baby, a negative birth experience was reported by 11.5% of those with no interventions and 39.5% of those with three or more, and by 8.8% after spontaneous labor against 16.4% after induction. Nobody should tell you that your attitude alone decides how you will feel afterwards. That is not what the evidence says, and it sets a woman up to blame herself.
"I understand you cannot promise me how this goes. I am asking you to promise me how I will be treated while it goes."
"Tell me the truth, ask me first, and believe me when I say something is wrong."