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“Part of our work at the EFM is to build bridges between farmworkers and non-farmworkers,” she says.

The international church-led relief agency Episcopal Relief & Development donated $15,000 to EFM, which facilitated the launch of a huge effort of rapid response.

You can’t find a clean assignment of blame for the high C-section rate in Wolf’s argument, but the advent of electronic fetal monitoring, or EFM, is a watershed in this narrative.

Even after the first randomized, controlled trial of EFM, published in 1976, showed that outcomes for labor in high-risk women monitored by an EFM and similar women screened with a fetal stethoscope differed only in that the first group experienced a higher rate of C-sections, doctors continued to use them; indeed, Wolf writes, “most doctors had become uneasy attending a birth without the information the device provided.”

And in the 1980s, lawyers began to use evidence from EFM readings in seeking malpractice settlements for birth injury, which further encouraged doctors to go for the “just in case” C-section.