The Free Birth Cult

In March, a 23-year-old pregnant member of the Free Birth Society’s MatriBirth Mentor Institute went into labor in her home country, Australia. She had decided, after finding the Free Birth Society, to undergo a “wild pregnancy” during which she would seek out no prenatal care or medical intervention during labor. It was day five of labor. She told other members of the Free Birth Society on an online forum that she was “exhausted and hitting a wall of confusion.” On the eighth day, she was “still going.” On the ninth, her “belly [was] taking on a strange shape as I contract, sort of like 2 bulges.” A sign of obstructed labor.

When her son was born, the mother posted a video of him “grunting and struggling to breathe, his chest retracting effortfully,” the Guardian reported. The mother asked the group “if this sounds normal for a sleeping newborn?” According to the Guardian’s recently published investigation into the Free Birth Society, “members expressed concern, but still no one told her to call emergency services immediately.” She later notified the group that her son had died.

Founded by former doula Emilee Saldaya and co-run by viral freebirther and mother of eleven Yolanda Norris-Clark, the Free Birth Society advertises itself as “a New Paradigm of Birth,” offering one-on-one birth coaching, self-study courses to learn “birth physiology, instinct-led prenatal care, how to create an aligned environment, and what it truly means to take full responsibility for your pregnancy and birth,” and more.

Many women don’t trust the medical establishment with their pregnancies, especially after Covid. Home, free, unmedicated, or other natural birth methods are trendy and growing in popularity. And although it seems to me a miracle that modern medicine can save a mother’s life when she’s hemorrhaging or deliver a breech baby, the backlash toward over-medicalized births is understandable. Some doctors perform cesarean sections when they’re not needed. Some doctors don’t allow women the choice to execute their birth plans, for no particular reason. Some women have been sexually assaulted by their doctors while in labor.

But this horrific Guardian investigation (as well as Kara Kennedy’s fantastic investigation into the Free Birth Society a couple of months ago) sheds light on what can happen when women emphatically pursue “free” birth. From the story:

When Norris-Clark freebirthed her eighth child in 2019, he was born “limp, unmoving, and grayish white”, she wrote in 2023. She held him and waited. “Had I intervened to accelerate his revival, this would have deprived him of his ownership over his vital and truly enlivening experience of transitioning independently to full incarnation.”

In 2022, Saldaya did the same, later sharing the video of her second child’s freebirth online. Over the course of a four minute, 40 second video, her limp and floppy son grunts and shows signs of acute respiratory distress. Saldaya does not call 911 or resuscitate him.

Experts who recently reviewed the video said it showed a life-threatening scenario; a medical professional would have begun resuscitation within 60 seconds. “Watching this video,” says Prof Michelle Telfer, an associate professor of midwifery at Yale, “is difficult. It’s like watching a parent sit by the pool while their child is quietly drowning and they do nothing.”

After the previously mentioned March incident, Free Birth Society members (current and former) created a Reddit group to “help deprogram from the mind control, culty atmosphere and rigid dogma of FBS.” They, along with Kennedy and journalists like her, may finally bring FBS down.

Members formed the group. Then, this happened:

On 8 August, in her ninth month of a wild pregnancy with her third child, she uploaded a podcast with Norris-Clark, discussing the [Reddit] backlash. Their critics were “a bunch of very deeply insecure, bitter, sad, lonely women”, Norris-Clark said. Saldaya laughed as she compared them to the fish that eat dead skin during a pedicure. “Disgusting,” she shuddered.

A week after the podcast went out, Saldaya stopped posting personal updates on social media. Speculation mounted among ex-FBS members, who knew her baby was due, but Saldaya stayed silent. And then, on 25 August, she posted an announcement.

“I recently gave birth to a beautiful baby, stillborn at 41 weeks of gestation. Our son, our baby, was not born alive.”

There were 15 pregnant teachers and students in the first-ever [MatriBirth Mentor Institute] school. Saldaya’s loss brought the number of full-term stillbirths or neonatal deaths in this cohort to three, all in a six-month period.

Last month, Norris-Clark flew to visit Saldaya in North Carolina. Afterwards, she took part in a birth trauma debrief with a mother who had lost her child. The subject of Saldaya’s recent loss came up. “She’s integrating this experience beautifully,” Norris-Clark said, adding, “She’s so grateful that she chose freebirth, especially for her son.”

Demonic. Read about it here.