“No one can really spare a woman the process of labor,” the doula muses. Pale and dehydrated, she herself is hooked up to an IV in an overflowing labor ward, nearing the end of her own excruciating pregnancy.

In retrospect, it was impatience and discontentment mixed with illusions of an easy income that drove us into the business that became our nightmare. Then a young pastor of a fragile church plant and new father, my man sought the solution to our struggle for sufficient time and money for both, in what appeared to have worked for others.