Investigation Reveals the Dangers of Influencers Touting Free Birth

When looking for somewhere to deliver a child, there are — broadly speaking — a couple of options available. Most people opt to deliver their babies in a hospital, surrounded by medical professionals and technology. Others prefer to work with midwives and doulas. While there are differences between the two, they have one thing in common: a certain level of experience and familiarity with the process, including knowing what to do if complications ensue.

And then there’s the idea of “free birth.” A paper published in 2024 in the journal Midwifery described free birth as “the deliberate decision to give birth without a regulated healthcare professional.” Unfortunately, there’s a troubling component to a popular group of free birth influencers — and it’s likely to have led to multiple instances of death and chronic medical conditions that could have been avoided.

That, at least, is one of the big takeaways from a harrowing investigation conducted by Sirin Kale and Lucy Osborne at The Guardian. Kale and Osborne focus on the efforts of the Free Birth Society, headed by Emilee Saldaya and Yolande Norris-Clark, which The Guardian notes takes an especially doctrinaire approach to free birth, eschewing ultrasounds and “[promoting] wild pregnancy, meaning pregnancy without any prenatal care.”

If you read the above and think that that’s a recipe for disaster, you are not wrong. Over the course of the investigation, Kale and Osborne describe pregnancies where something was clearly amiss — and yet no one involved did what would normally be the case in a medical emergency: in other words, calling 911 or going to the hospital.

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This is not an isolated incident, unfortunately. The Guardian notes that the Free Birth Society’s podcasts have been downloaded millions ot times, while its YouTube videos have notched around 25 million views. There’s also the matter of the for-profit Zoom courses the business has organized. As Kale and Osborne point out, “American midwives study for years at the feet of elder midwives, who train them in how to resolve life-threatening birth complications.” This is in sharp contrast to the Free Birth Society’s methods — and it’s unsettling (though not surprising) to see that that has had tragic effects for parents and children alike.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…