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Transcript:
I don’t have children. Human children, that is. I do not want human children, and at this age, I will certainly never give birth to a human child. Because of this, I do not have particularly strong opinions on what pregnant people choose to do during pregnancy and childbirth. In fact, my strongest opinion on this is that a pregnant person has the right to do whatever they want with their body, and we as a society should provide pregnant people with all of the resources and education and options to allow them to choose the healthiest options for themselves and for their fetus and/or future baby. I know, super hot take but there it is.
Despite that being my own position, over the years I have been interested in the data surrounding certain decisions a pregnant person can make, because I think more data, more research, and more conversation about this stuff helps everyone make better decisions. So, while I think a pregnant person has the right to do what they want, I’m still interested in research that explores the drawbacks of alcohol and other drug use during pregnancy, or the benefits of breastfeeding over feeding babies formula, or whether giving birth at home is any more dangerous than giving birth in a hospital.
That last one has been particularly contentious over the years, especially in skeptic circles. For instance, in 2014, Dr. Amy Tuteur, the “Skeptical OB,” published what appears to be a downright silly misreading of a study in order to claim that homebirths are wildly more dangerous than hospital births, an assertion that was quickly corrected by my statistician friend Jamie Bernstein for Grounded Parents who read the actual study and put the data into context. The back-and-forth continued through hundreds of comments and dozens more blog posts and I’m not sure if anyone actually changed their mind about anything. The two sides boiled down to “homebirths increase the risk to the mother and the baby and any increase in risk is bad,” and “the increase in risk is very small for most mothers, and homebirth lowers other risks that make homebirth a perfectly acceptable choice for an educated and prepared person.”
I’ll get into a little of that in more detail in a bit, but I want to say that in fact, today I am not going to talk about the relative risks of homebirth in which reasonable people can disagree over “the best option” for people giving birth. Because unfortunately, there’s a new-ish trend in giving birth that is so risky for the parent and child that there’s no reasonable argument for it. The only debate to be had is how to stop people from doing it. I’m talking about Free Birth.
This week, The Guardian published a years-long investigation that has revealed the utter depravity behind social media influencers who are selling the idea that it’s not just better to give birth at home, but better to avoid any kind of prenatal screening before giving birth far from any kind of medical expert–hospitals, doctors, nurses, and even midwives or doulas are strictly forbidden. And if the parent or baby dies? Well, that’s just what was meant to happen, and if anyone brings it up, they will be quickly banned and silenced.
Now, I usually encourage people to click the link in the description to go to the transcript and read all the sources I quote just so you know I’m not making things up, but today I’m going to do something rare that will probably negatively impact this video’s reach in the algorithm: I encourage you to pause this right now and go read the Guardian’s investigation in full. Because it isn’t just that they gathered a lot of damning information about this “movement” – it’s also just really well-written, and the ending absolutely snapped my little heart in half. And in this video, I am going to spoil that ending. Okay? Spoiler alert given.
Okay. So there are two women at the heart of this…let’s see, there are many words to use. Movement? Sure. Cult? Maybe! Scam? Definitely, though we usually think of scams as being run by people who fully know it’s a scam and I don’t know that that’s what’s happening here. Emilee Saldaya and Yolande Norris-Clark are ex-doulas, people who guide people through life events like pregnancy and childbirth. The term isn’t necessarily strictly regulated, and in the US and Canada, where Saldaya and Norris-Clark are from respectively, there’s no requirement to meet any particular level of education and training. That said, there are lots of organizations that provide certification to help people find doulas who are properly trained to do things like build a birth plan, provide breathing exercises and birthing positions, and crucially to recognize when a person is in need of actual medical help.
Instead of doing any of those things, though, Saldaya and Norris-Clarke came up with a money making scheme: the Free Birth Society, which encompasses a podcast with millions of downloads, an Instagram account with 133,000 followers, a YouTube channel with 25 million views, and a course of pre-recorded videos that costs hundreds of dollars.
The article does a great job of describing Saldaya and Norris-Clarke, but I’ll just read you two paragraphs that gave me whiplash:
“By 2020, Saldaya and Norris-Clark had built a lucrative partnership. Norris-Clark was the charismatic, intellectual one. With her photogenic brood of children, she sold the promise of ease to the burned-out mothers following her social media accounts. Her births were pain-free and orgasmic, and she had far more children than most people do, yet Norris-Clark never seemed exhausted or burdened by them. In comparison, Saldaya was abrasive but, unlike Norris-Clark, who could seem scatterbrained and easily distracted, Saldaya was always focused on growing the business.
“Friends say Saldaya often took her ideological cues from her business partner. After Norris-Clark decided she did not believe in gravity, Saldaya announced she was no longer “round [Earth] committed” When Norris-Clark said she no longer believed in germ theory, Saldaya told friends she did not wash her hands. When Norris-Clark said she no longer identified as a feminist and wished to submit to her husband, Saldaya quietly stopped marketing the podcast as “radical feminist”.”
I’m sorry but if you have two people, and the more “intellectual” one doesn’t believe in gravity or germ theory, you need to get the other one on a ventilator immediately because she’s absolutely going to forget to breathe soon.
The Guardian describes many women who join the Free Birth Society only to experience complications during childbirth, because of COURSE they did. As a reminder, it’s not even JUST that these idiots tell people not to have any medical support present at birth–it’s that they tell them also to experience “wild pregnancy,” which means no ultrasounds, no genetic screenings, no prenatal check-ins at all, and no emergency plans for what to do if something goes wrong. Hell, they don’t even learn how to identify when something goes wrong, since Saldaya and Norris-Clark even stated that babies should “choose” to begin their lives, so if they aren’t breathing after birth, it’s “meddling” and “sabotage” to resuscitate them. Yes. Seriously.
In anecdote after anecdote, the Guardian cites women who fully trusted Saldaya and Norris-Clark throughout their pregnancies, and begged them for help when things went wrong at the end, only for them to tell them to relax and everything was going to be fine. When it didn’t turn out fine, the women were kicked out of the Free Birth Society and never spoken of again.
Incredibly, this works as a business plan. These women have allegedly made millions of dollars from this grift despite having actual deaths on their hands, because MOST women who give birth will do so with minor or no complications. Humans thrived for a very long time with no medical interventions for precisely this reason: sure, we evolved to cook our babies giant heads a bit longer in the womb before shoving them through a relatively small passage, but that extra intelligence was worth it even if 1-2% of women died in childbirth. The women who didn’t die when delivering their first child were very likely to successfully birth a few more, so they made up for the loss.
That’s why when it comes to the statistics on home births, the research seems to suggest that it’s generally safe if prenatal screening show both parent and fetus are healthy and correctly positioned, if there’s a plan for getting to a hospital if things go wrong, and if the parent has already successfully delivered a child previously. And that’s why it’s so dangerous that the Freebirth Society crosses out all of those modifiers and insists that it’s extraordinarily abnormal for a woman to be pregnant with a fetus she can’t safely give birth to.
That’s the beauty of modern medicine: we don’t need to sacrifice 1-2% of pregnant people because of a quirk or evolution. I don’t have to wander through life blind because I was born with fucked up eyeballs. We don’t need to let people suffer or die of AIDS or polio or several kinds of cancer.
So why do the Freebirth Society ladies insist that we should? You could argue it’s purely a grift and that they don’t believe what they’re saying, but here’s where I ruin the end of the Guardian article: the con was invented by Saldaya, but she lacked credibility because her child at the time was born with medical intervention. So she brought on Norris-Clark, who had already had a gaggle of kids with no such intervention. For her next pregnancy, Saldaya tried to freebirth but had to go to the hospital for a procedure before she could give birth at home, which meant it didn’t “count.” This year, pregnant with her third child, Saldaya really went for it. “Wild pregnancy” with no prenatal care, and a plan to avoid all medical interventions. Her due date was in August and she was silent on social media for several weeks, before finally revealing on August 25th that her son was “not born alive.” It’s worth noting that earlier in the piece, Saldaya admits that if a baby is born alive but with complications that she fails to treat, she will avoid accountability by saying that the baby was born already dead.
It’s a grift, and a lucrative one at that, but it’s clearly one that Saldaya believes in. Or believed in. Maybe she’s in the process of changing her mind, but in the meanwhile all the social media pages are still up. The grift goes on.
All of this hasn’t happened in a vacuum. It’s a story that I’ve been talking about for decades now: remove agency from women. Add in societal pressures. In place of agency, tell women some fantasy about magical powers that allow them to transcend those challenges. Then blame them for suffering and dying because they didn’t use their magic the right way.
This is how it worked with “the Secret,” where women were told that we could achieve all our dreams by wishing hard enough and if you die of cancer well, you should have wished harder.
It’s how it worked with Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vaccine garbage, where women were told that as mothers they should just KNOW what doctors’ advice they should reject, and if their child has autism it’s because they weren’t good enough “Tiger Moms.”
And it’s how this works: women are told that their bodies are magical, and that it’s their superpower to be able to gestate and give birth to a perfect baby, and if they don’t? Well, it’s their own fault. “Radical responsibility” is the term that Saldaya and Norris-Clark use. One of their followers showed the Guardian her notes while listening to their podcast: “Processing fears. What would happen if my baby died? What would happen if I died? … I would take full responsibility.” On 4 April 2023: “Radical responsibility is the way … for the safety of me and baby.” That woman nearly died trying to give birth at home, losing so much blood she was rushed to the hospital for a transfusion.
All of these grifts start with that removal of agency. I don’t have kids but I do have a few friends with kids. Not many, but a few, and among them I know at least two who had horrifically traumatic experiences giving birth in a hospital. When I say traumatic I mean that they have spent years in therapy, doing the work to fix what trusted medical professionals did to them. They were violated, injured, terrified, at a time when society tells us they’re supposed to be filled with love and joy.
I thought it was weird that I don’t know many parents but I do know several who had this experience so I did a quick search. The first study I found stated that consistent data suggests about 10% of women experience traumatic births…in the NETHERLANDS. And if you don’t know why I’m stressing that, you’ve never had to get medical care in the United States, where we have the highest rate of maternal mortality of all high-income countries, with more than 80% of those deaths being preventable. Nearly two out of three maternal deaths in the U.S. occur during the postpartum period. The Netherlands, like every other developed nation, provides medical care for pregnant people via national insurance. The United States does not, nor do we have any guaranteed doctors’ visits, nor any guaranteed postpartum home visits to check on the health of the parents and babies.
The US has rates of c-sections about twice the optimal number.
“In 1985, the Lancet published a landmark report by the World Health Organization stating there was “no justification for any region in the world to have a CS rate higher than 10%–15%.” In the US it’s 33%. That’s a problem, because c-sections, while extremely common, are still major surgeries that have potential complications and knock-on effects: infections, bleeding, embolism, recovery time, and even the higher cost. But as a 2017 paper highlights, in the US we hand c-sections out like candy thanks to systemic factors like hospitals that prioritize maintaining a schedule over a woman and her child’s comfort and health, which is perhaps reflected in the statistic that “male physicians and physicians practicing in university settings being associated with higher rates of CS.”
The report also details the troubling racial and socioeconomic factors of who gets a c-section: people of color are more likely to get a c-section than white people, and immigrants are more likely to get a c-section than native-born Americans. Having trouble with the English language is a risk factor, which makes me wonder how much of this is all due to members of the medical establishment viewing women, especially certain women they see as beneath them, as objects, problems to be solved as efficiently as possible.
These are all factors that make women want to look outside of the medical establishment: why am I paying through the nose for “treatment” that is so bad that I might end up getting a major surgery I don’t want or need, or so bad that I might end up feeling so violated and destroyed that I never want a doctor to touch me again? That’s the loss of agency that a good con artist recognizes–the gap where they can slide in and make some coin, whether they believe what they’re selling or not.
All of which brings me to this: how do we stop the Freebirth Society? Back in 2018, the Daily Beast did a story about the Freebirthers, but it had some differences from the recent Guardian piece. For instance, one of the women featured in the Daily Beast article admitted to the Guardian that she had lied to the Daily Beast in order to downplay Saldaya and Norris-Clark’s involvement in the death of her newborn. The Daily Beast also highlighted a group of skeptics who actively tried to stop the Freebirth Society, by posting on their forums under sock puppets and reaching out to expecting mothers to convince them to see a doctor. Because this was the internet, some of those skeptics reached out to tell those mothers that they were killing their own babies, that they should be punished, that they should be in prison. Others said that Saldaya and Norris-Clark should be punished or in prison.
But that, of course, is tricky territory. As I said at the top: I don’t think we should punish a pregnant person for what they do to their body, regardless of how it may affect a fetus. I think that’s a slippery slope to women having no bodily autonomy at all. Once a baby is born, how do we determine that a parent deserves punishment for its subsequent death? We need to establish that the baby was born alive; that the life could have been saved; and that the parent chose to let it die, or directly caused the death. I know we can come up with cases where we can all say “This hypothetical situation would be a slam dunk in court” but there are so many gray areas, and so many ways that we go down the slope once we decide that it’s okay to prosecute a woman for a tragic birth outcome.
As for Saldaya and Norris-Clark themselves, and any other “leader” who preaches this sort of misinformation, it’s still tricky. They keep changing their titles and disclaimers to insist that they aren’t giving medical advice, and that every individual woman is responsible for her own actions after listening to their confident advice on their podcasts and instagram stories and whatnot. I don’t know what can or should be done from a criminal perspective, though with RFK, Jr. running our health services and other sociopathic billionaires running the platforms these women are using, I don’t have any hope that anything would be done anyway.
I think the only clear solution is the one that seems equally unrealistic but, in fact, is, on a long enough timescale: before the con artists, before the magical thinking, came the removal of agency. We need to educate people about their bodies at a young age; give them the tools to control their own reproduction; provide them with food, shelter, and an income; and set up a comprehensive single payer healthcare system that prioritizes preventative care, wellness checks, and postnatal care for parents and their babies.
If we do that, then we don’t have to worry about how to stop con artists. The con artists would never have found an essential gap in our society to fill.
