Disturbed by the situation, another resident in County’s obstetrics unit, Dr. Bernard Rosenfeld, quietly copied the medical records for hundreds of sterilizations. Eventually, he passed this documentation along to Antonia Hernández, a recent graduate from U.C.L.A. Law School who worked at the Los Angeles Center for Law & Justice, a legal advocacy group just a few blocks away from County Hospital. She and her colleagues joined forces with the Chicana feminist organization Comisión Feminil, led by a legal secretary named Gloria Molina, to build a case on the foundations laid by the recently decided Roe v. Wade. If a woman had a civil right to terminate a pregnancy, they argued, she also had a civil right to procreate.

Like many of the plaintiffs that Hernández and Molina persuaded to join Madrigal v. Quilligan, Consuelo Hermosillo initially wanted nothing to do with the case. Her sterilization at County hospital had become a secret so painful that she and her husband never shared it with anyone. They did not even discuss it when they were alone. But after Hernández showed her the evidence Rosenfeld had gathered, Hermosillo joined the suit, without telling her husband, in hopes that would help protect other women — perhaps even her two daughters. She told a baby sitter she was going to work and rode a bus alone to the courthouse, angry, ashamed and afraid.

After Judge Curtis’s ruling, Hermosillo’s silence cemented. She never built friendships with the other plaintiffs. Some of them, she’d learned, were being beaten and castigated by their husbands for being sterilized. Her husband didn’t do that. But Hermosillo had no one to confide in either. Once, she told me, she accompanied her son to a funeral for his friend’s mother and was surprised by the photographs at the wake: Until that moment, she had no idea that the deceased was also one of the “Madrigal Ten.”

Though the hospital won, Madrigal changed state laws and buttressed the careers of several prominent Latino politicians. In its wake, the California Department of Health revised its sterilization guidelines to include a 72-hour waiting period and issued a booklet on sterilization in Spanish. The California State Legislature unanimously repealed its sterilization law, which had legalized over 20,000 nonconsensual procedures since 1909. Hernández went on to become the president of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund; Molina later became the first Chicana elected to the Los Angeles City Council.

“What interested me about this case,” Tajima-Pena told me, “is how you have well-meaning policy and some very well-meaning doctors, and how women could still be abused.” Where Espino sees a history of “backdoor eugenics,” Tajima-Pena is more persuaded by the sociologist Elena Gutiérrez’s argument that the sterilizations at County Hospital were a result of a “perfect storm” of pressures: fears about a global “population bomb” mixing with prejudice against welfare use and illegitimacy, accelerated by a rush of federal funding for family planning through the War on Poverty.

“To sort of claim that we’re part of a greater goal of sterilizing the Mexican population that immigrates to Los Angeles,” Dr. Michael Kreitzer, a defendant in Madrigal v. Quilligan, says in the film — “I’m offended by that. That’s not what we did. That’s not what we discussed. That’s not what anybody even intimated.”

“It’s not like these evil old white guys are the problem,” Tajima-Peña told me, the day before “No Más Bebés” screened at the NYC Doc festival in November. “We’re all the problem. Because we all have this really complicated, maybe misguided thinking about what reproductive freedom really means.” Such beliefs are still common even among progressives, she pointed out. When she and Espino showed rough cuts of the film to friendly audiences before its June debut, people would find out that one of the plaintiffs, Maria Hurtado, had five children and say, “Well, she already had five kids.”