After Rachel Somerstein was rushed into an operating room for an unplanned caesarean section, her doctor made the first cut. “I felt that,” she told him. “You’ll feel pressure,” the doctor responded. But, horrifyingly, Somerstein “felt it all: the separation of my rectus muscles; the scissors used to move my bladder; the scalpel, with which he ‘incised’ my uterus.” When her daughter was born, Somerstein was so traumatized that she couldn’t hold her baby.
” Shockingly, Somerstein’s research shows that the electronic fetal monitoring technology used in hospitals, known as EFM, is “notoriously unreliable.” Often, it reports a falling fetal heart rate or stalled labor when the baby and mother are perfectly healthy. But it allows doctors and nurses to tend to many patients, running from room to room and leaving patients alone.