A half century ago electronic fetal monitoring was rushed into clinical use with the promise that the secrets of fetal heart rate decelerations had been discovered and that the newly discovered knowledge would prevent cerebral palsy with just in time cesarean sections preventing babies from experiencing asphyxia, which was thought to be the primary cause of cerebral palsy. In the years since electronic fetal monitoring’s debut, it has been discovered that asphyxia is a rare cause of cerebral palsy. At the (...) same time electronic fetal monitoring use increased to 85% of all labors, the C-section rate increased to 33% without an attributable decrease in the rate of cerebral palsy. What went wrong with electronic fetal monitoring? The answer lies in a new analysis of the physiologic theories concerning fetal heart rate decelerations, demonstrating that the earlier electronic fetal monitoring theories were wrong. This revelation is only the latest evidence that electronic fetal monitoring use today... (shrink)

The Alice Books, full of illogical thoughts, words, and contradictions, were unrivaled entertainment until the publication of the medical literature promoting electronic fetal monitoring for every pregnancy. The modern-day EFM advocates acknowledge EFM’s decades long failure but simultaneously recommend EFM use for lawsuit protection and because the profession has used EFM for every pregnancy for fifty years, therefore, it must be efficacious. These self-indulgent, illogical rationalizations ignore the half century of evidence-based scientific research proving that EFM is a complete failure (...) as well as ignoring the fact that continued EFM use violates the fundamental principles of modern bioethics. This blind advocacy perpetuates four pernicious EFM harms occurring to mothers, babies, and the medical profession itself. This article sets out these four EFM harms with the goal of abolishing the misguided, illogical, contradictory, arguments used by the twenty-first century EFM Lewis Carroll mimics. (shrink)