As Esau Lopez was asphyxiated for the first 17 minutes of his life on Earth, the atmosphere in the room remained serene, even ecstatic. Acoustic music crooned from a speaker in a modest two-bedroom apartment in a suburb of Pennsylvania. “You are a queen,” murmured one of three friends in the room.
Only Esau’s mother, Gabrielle Lopez, felt something was wrong. She was pushing hard, but her son would not be born. “Can you help [him] out?” she asked, as Esau crowned. “Baby is coming,” the friend replied. Four minutes later, Lopez asked again, “Can you grab [him]?” Another friend murmured, “Baby is safe.” Six minutes passed. Again, Lopez asked, “Can you grab [him]?”
Lopez could not see the cord wrapped around her son’s neck, nor the bubbles blowing from his mouth. She did not know that his shoulder was grinding against her pubic bone, like a tire spinning on gravel. But “deep down”, she says, “I knew he was stuck.”
Esau was experiencing shoulder dystocia, meaning his head was born, but his body did not follow. Midwives and obstetricians are trained in how to resolve this complication, which occurs in up to 1% of births, but as Lopez was freebirthing, meaning giving birth without any medical providers present, no one in the room understood that, with every minute that passed, Esau was sustaining an irreversible brain injury. In a birth attended by a trained professional, a five-minute delay between a baby’s head and body emerging would be an emergency. Seventeen minutes is unthinkable.
With a superhuman effort, Lopez bore down, and Esau was born at 10pm on 9 October 2022. He was limp and floppy and lifeless. His body was white and his legs were purple, both signs of acute oxygen deprivation. The only noise he made was a faint gurgle. His father Rolando handed Esau to his mother. “Do you think he needs air?” she asked. “He’s good,” her friend replied. Lopez cradled her unmoving son, her eyes huge.
Everyone in the room was scared now, but hiding it. To articulate what they were all feeling seemed huge, like a betrayal of Lopez and her ability to bring Esau into the world, but also of something greater: of birth itself. As the minutes crawled by, and Esau didn’t stir, Lopez and her three friends reminded themselves of what their mentor, the founder of the Free Birth Society, Emilee Saldaya, had taught them: birth is safe. Trust the process.
So they tamped down their rising panic and waited. “It felt,” recalls Lopez’s friend, “that we entered some sort of time warp.”
* * *
Lopez had met her three friends through the Free Birth Society (FBS), a business that promotes freebirth. Unlike home birth – birth at home with a midwife in attendance – freebirth means giving birth without any medical support. FBS promotes a version widely seen as extreme, even among freebirth advocates: it is anti-ultrasound, which it falsely claims harms babies, downplays serious medical conditions and promotes wild pregnancy, meaning pregnancy without any prenatal care.
FBS was founded by ex-doula Emilee Saldaya, and most women find it through its podcast, which has been downloaded 5m times, its Instagram account, which has 132,000 followers, its YouTube, with nearly 25m views, or its bestselling The Complete Guide to Freebirth, a video course co-created by Saldaya with fellow ex-doula Yolande Norris-Clark, available for download from FBS’s slick website. Analysis of FBS’s financial records by Stacey Ferris, a forensic accountant and academic at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, suggests it has generated revenues exceeding $13m since 2018.
When Lopez discovered the podcast she was hooked, listening to an episode almost every day. For $299, she joined FBS’s paid-for, private online community, the Lighthouse, where she met the three friends in the room when Esau was born. To prepare for her freebirth, she purchased The Complete Guide to Freebirth in May 2022 for $399 – a vast sum to the then 23-year-old nanny.
After consuming hundreds of hours of FBS materials, Lopez grew convinced freebirthing was the safest way to deliver her unborn child, away from unnecessary medical interventions. Earlier in her three-day labor, Lopez had visited her local hospital for an ultrasound as the baby wasn’t moving as much as usual. Staff urged her to stay, warning she was at high risk of shoulder dystocia, as the baby was “huge”. But Lopez wasn’t concerned. Fresh in her memory was a newsletter she’d received from Norris-Clark, stating fears of shoulder dystocia were “greatly exaggerated”. From The Complete Guide to Freebirth, Lopez had learned that women’s “bodies do not grow babies that we cannot birth”.
After a few minutes, with Esau still not breathing, the spell in Lopez’s bedroom broke. Lopez sprang into action, instinctively performing CPR on her son as her friend Googled how to do it, while another dialled 911. After being resuscitated by paramedics, Esau was taken to pediatric intensive care, where he stayed for 21 days. He suffered hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, a brain injury caused by oxygen deprivation.
Now three, Esau is severely disabled and fed through a tube. “He is a sweet, sensitive boy,” Lopez says. “He wants to do things like other children, but gets frustrated that his body won’t let him.” Esau loves Ms Rachel, Sesame Street and watching his parents blow bubbles. When he learned how to turn the page of a picturebook, Lopez was overjoyed: “The small gains are huge for us.”
Looking back at the person she was when she was pregnant, it’s sometimes hard for Lopez to recognise herself. Over the faint roar of a nearby highway, as Esau plays with his toys, Lopez tries to explain how she got caught up in FBS. “Nobody joins a cult willingly,” she says. “You think you’re joining a great movement.”
* * *
Dressed in a flowing white robe, Saldaya wore a gold crown, shaped to resemble the rays of the sun. Her most loyal followers sat around her in a circle in a shaded meadow. It was June 2021. One hundred women had gathered for the first annual Matriarch Rising, a female-only festival held on Saldaya’s 53-acre plot in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina. “All of these women,” remembers Serendipiti Day, 34, a former FBS employee, “were gathered around her with their notebooks, taking down every single word.”
By 2021, Saldaya was the apex influencer of the freebirth world. The image of her, half-naked, in her crown, posing in a meadow, would go on to become a core part of FBS’s marketing materials. “I def think I own freebirth,” she texted another freelance employee.
Saldaya presided over a movement that told women it was returning something sacred that had been stolen from them. “We are truly disrupting the conditioning of over a hundred years of obstetric violence,” Saldaya declared, describing herself, in a promotional YouTube video, as a “pioneer of the birth liberation movement”.
Emails flooded into FBS from women who had experienced life-affirming unassisted births. Many had previously had traumatic births in hospital. The obstetrician-gynecologist who delivered writer and birth worker Kaitlin Pearl Coghill’s second child in 2015 performed a membrane sweep, an internal procedure to induce labor, without her consent. He subsequently lost his license for having a sexual relationship with a patient. “He was a creep,” says Coghill, 36, who lives in southern California, of her doctor, “and he was abusive, and it definitely felt like sexual assault.”
After discovering FBS, in 2020 Coghill freebirthed her third child in a joyous four-hour labor. “It changed my life,” Coghill says. “I’d never felt so much power in my body.”
Soo Downe, a British midwife and professor at the University of Lancashire, says the prevalence of freebirthing, while low, appears to be increasing across the world as women lose trust in professional maternity services. It is a dynamic that is especially acute in the US, which has one of the highest maternal mortality rates among wealthy countries in the world. Experts point to a number of factors: lack of access to midwife-led care, an overly interventionist approach driven by fear of litigation and a desire, among healthcare providers, to maximize profit. A lack of universal healthcare means some women have to pay for home birth midwives.
There is also a more medicalized approach to birth than in other developed countries with strong cultures of midwifery. “I have seen episiotomies [a cut to widen the vaginal opening] done without consent,” says Ivy Joeva, a doula from the city of Ventura. “There’s a doctor in LA that’s referred to as ‘the butcher’ because she just [C]-sections people,” Joeva says. “Needed or not.”
Hermine Hayes-Klein, an attorney based in Oregon who specialises in maternity law, says she talks to mothers who are “suicidal” following births. “The women I know who have chosen to give birth unassisted, it’s often because they have horrific trauma from that first birth that they feel they barely survived,” she says. “Things were done to them without their consent, they were injured as a result – sometimes seriously injured – and they believe it will happen again if they go back into a hospital.”
To these women, FBS showed another way was possible. It launched in 2017, the year before Instagram reached 1bn users, and Saldaya was among the first wave of entrepreneurs to harness the power of social media, transfixing women with images of mothers serenely holding babies they’d successfully freebirthed at home. Next, women binged the podcast. Episodes usually featured Saldaya interviewing women about their previous, traumatic births, which were “sabotaged” by doctors and midwives. Saldaya raged about the abuse she’d seen: the babies killed by drug overdoses, the women sexually assaulted by doctors, the midwives who promised to protect their clients, only to betray them.
Her guests, many of whom found freebirth through the podcast itself, went on to share their birth stories. These were often multi-day epics, in which the women were pushed to their physical and mental limits, before emerging triumphant, self-doubt shed like snake skin, a new, heroic identity as a freebirthing mother forged.
Saldaya and Norris-Clark promised their followers they, too, could experience the euphoria of unassisted birth, if they dropped their reliance on a medical establishment that often gets it wrong on women’s health. This message resonated with thoughtful, health-conscious women who did not like much of what they saw in contemporary culture – the reliance on pharmaceuticals and junk food, or what they perceived to be an excessive reaction to the Covid pandemic – and were willing to make difficult choices, for the benefit of their families. Instead of putting their trust in a failing system, women would place their trust in themselves. If a healthy mother went into labor, FBS taught, a healthy mother and a healthy baby would come out. Together, Saldaya and Norris-Clark codified an approach to freebirth that taught most birth complications were simply a “variation of normal”.
Freebirthing was not just safe, they argued, but safer than a birth with medical support. Saldaya and Norris-Clark decreed that prolonged rupture of membranes, breech babies, week-long labors and gestational diabetes could all be variations of normal, and usually nothing for the freebirthing mother to worry about. (All are known to increase the risk to mothers and babies during birth.) According to experts, the pair also made false or dangerous claims about hemorrhage, shoulder dystocia, retained placenta and infant resuscitation.
Norris-Clark and Saldaya were sometimes careful to caveat their advice with disclaimers, stressing they were not qualified medical professionals and drawing only on their personal experience. They acknowledged there were scenarios that could be life-threatening, though presented them as very rare, and said it was a woman’s choice how to have her baby and whether to transfer to hospital. Yet they spoke with such confidence and apparent credibility that many women trusted information they only later discovered was medically unsound. In the Lighthouse forum in August 2022, a mother posted that her premature baby, who had required “an hour of mouth to mouth” resuscitation, was now struggling to breathe on her own. A medical professional is likely to have urged the mother to take the child to a hospital or dial 911. In her reply, Saldaya acknowledged she was not there, but said “all sounds totally normal … shallow breaths and gurgling wouldn’t personally concern me.”
Mother Had a baby 2 days shy of 36 weeks. She is having trouble breathing on her own, any suggestions on what to do?
Saldaya how many days is she now? What’s the breathing like? How do you know she’s struggling? Dark room, naked, skin to skin. Can she swallow? Is she peeing and pooping?
Mother We just had her 3 hours ago. Had to give mouth to mouth to get her to start breathing. It’s just very shallow breaths and she has been kind of gurgling. She is skin to skin with dad. She hasn’t peed yet but she did have meconium when she came out. Haven’t had a chance to nurse because of her not breathing great.
Mother It took like an hour of mouth to mouth to get her to start breathing.
Saldaya I’d have her skin to skin entirely uninterrupted with you, no one else. Full naked, no bra. That all sounds totally normal, but I’m obvi not there nor seeing videos. Shallow breathing and gurgling wouldn’t personally concern me. She needs to be on your bare breasts to follow nursing instincts.
When she got pregnant that same year, Nicole Garrison, 34, an artist from New Jersey, thought she’d give birth in a birth center, or perhaps at home with a midwife. She began Googling and came across FBS. “As soon as I heard Emilee talking,” Garrison says, “I was like, oh my goodness, this is my tribe.” She listened to around 30 podcasts, sometimes taking notes.
Garrison sits cross-legged on the floor of her immaculate cottage, flicking through the journals she kept at the time. “I can literally feel my stomach churning reading this,” she says, in a deep, soft voice.
On 4 February 2023, she listened to an FBS podcast and wrote: “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.”
Radical responsibility is the closest thing FBS has to a doctrine. Saldaya took the term from a self-help book aimed at CEOs and business leaders, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. In FBS, to take radical responsibility means that a freebirthing mother assumes complete responsibility for all the outcomes of her birth, including her own death or that of her child. No one is coming to save her, nor does she want them to. She is fully autonomous or, in FBS parlance, sovereign.
“What’s crazy,” Garrison says, “is no one had a gun to my head. I was doing the brainwashing.”
Her water broke on 3 July 2023. Seven days later her daughter was born “pink and perfect”, but Garrison began to hemorrhage. Her then-partner called an ambulance, but Garrison sent it away: FBS teaches that hemorrhage “is almost unheard of” in a freebirth. In reality, while severe bleeding is rare, without medical care women can bleed to death in 15 minutes.
After the paramedics left, Garrison passed out. When she woke up she was choking on her vomit. “I came back from a place of complete abyss, black, separation from everyone, from God himself. I know I was dying.” Her partner called 911 again. At the hospital, doctors gave her a blood transfusion and removed her placenta.
Garrison had lied to her family about her plans to freebirth. In the hospital, when she saw the devastation on their faces, Garrison began to realize “something is wrong with the women running these programs. That house of cards I had built came tumbling down.”
* * *
Like so many of the businesses – and ideologies – that thrive on social media, FBS cultivates a sanitized image of the product it promotes. Saldaya never hosts podcast guests who regret their decision to freebirth. And she routinely deletes negative comments on Instagram, such as the one posted earlier this year by a mother who lost her daughter: “My baby died 41 weeks stillborn after I followed your teachings and I will regret it for the rest of my life.” (The mother was also blocked.)
The first woman known to have lost her baby after following Saldaya’s advice was Lorren Holliday. When she got pregnant in 2018, she interviewed midwives, but couldn’t afford the $5,000 downpayment for their services. Reluctantly, she resigned herself to the hospital, until, scrolling through Instagram one day, she found FBS: “What they offered was exactly what I was looking for.” A friendly animal lover with short pink hair, Holliday lives in a trailer on an acre of land in the Arizona desert with her husband, Chris, their three barefoot children and 35 dogs, cats, ducks, goats, chickens and turkeys. “I wanted health. I wanted natural.”
She began bingeing the podcast and joined Saldaya’s FBS Facebook group. A freebirth, Holliday believed, would give her baby the most gentle start to life.
Holliday was in her Airstream caravan when her contractions began on 1 October 2018. She was 41 weeks pregnant. By day three she realised they “weren’t spread out any more. It was like one long contraction.” Holliday began messaging Saldaya for advice. “The pain is unbearable … I just want to know if I’m not progressing,” she wrote on 4 October. She said she’d been vomiting, and explained a pattern of contractions that would have rung alarm bells for a medical professional. Saldaya said the pain was not unbearable – thinking of it that way “is a dead end – or a path to hospital birth”. She added, “You’ll have to die 1000 deaths and let go of everything that you think you can’t do.”
Over the next two days, Holliday would tell Saldaya she was swollen, in excruciating pain, her water was “brownish” and she was “pouring colored fluids”. She also reported foul-smelling amniotic fluids, a possible sign of infection, and sent a photo showing what was possibly meconium, a baby’s first stool. In a hospital, staff recommend fetal monitoring to assess the baby’s heartbeat, as meconium can cause respiratory distress.
“It doesn’t even look like meconium to me,” Saldaya replied. “All looks well and healthy. Ride those waves sister, you babies [sic] coming! All is well.”
At the same time, Holliday was posting in the FBS Facebook group. “I remember typing,” says midwife Ranee LaPointe, a member of the group, “‘please go to the hospital.’ And as quickly as I would type it, it would get taken down.” Administrators told LaPointe that talk of hospitals was against the group’s rules.
On the evening of 6 October 2018, after six days of active labor – unheard of in a medically managed birth – Holliday sent Saldaya a photograph of luminous green meconium. The following day, Saldaya asked for an update. Holliday said the baby wasn’t moving much and she hadn’t been able to urinate for 24 hours. Saldaya said she would go to hospital at this point, but suggested she may want to lie to doctors about when her water broke. She sent her a script to deceive medics.
Saldaya Some women fudge the date and when their waters open
Saldaya If you go in and say it’s been open for 24+hours they will c Section immediately
Holliday Good…I think Im going to go in…i feel terrible about it… but i don’t want to let me pride hurt this baby…yeah im not going to tell the whole truth for sure…oh wow… should i say 12 hours?
Saldaya [Tell doctors] “I recently began labor and my water opened this morning but it has a bad smell and I thought it best to come in and get a NST [non stress test] and catheter and go from there. I’m not sure I want to be admitted yet, just want help getting a sense of what is going on.”
At the hospital, Holliday learned her daughter was dead. Journey Moon had dark hair like her father. Holliday doesn’t know what color her eyes would have been, but she likes to imagine they were blue.
After Journey Moon died, the Daily Beast reported on the case. At Saldaya’s request, Holliday lied to the journalist, saying Saldaya didn’t advise her during her birth, and Saldaya said she’d provided no advice. “We tweaked,” Holliday says bitterly, “that little interview.”
Both Saldaya and Holliday received hate mail after the article was published. “I wanted the best for Journey Moon,” Holliday says of her decision to freebirth. “That’s why I stuck it out so long, to give her the best birth possible. When people started calling me selfish and greedy, that killed me, because I did it for her.”
Saldaya closed down the Facebook group and set up a paid-for membership. She would crow that taking the membership behind a paywall actually strengthened the business, because it enabled her to collect fees. “We’ve been rocking ever since,” Saldaya wrote in a 2023 post in Lighthouse.
Saldaya has always denied involvement in Journey Moon’s death. “The story wound up that I was her virtual midwife,” she would later tell students, “which is not true. We had never worked together. I didn’t know this woman at all.”
* * *
When she had moved to LA as a 17-year-old high school dropout, Emilee Saldaya was bubbly and fun-loving, with a forceful personality that belied her small stature. Born Emily Benner in Florida, she had inherited from her obstetrician-gynecologist nurse mother an interest in birth, and from her father, who sold medical equipment to hospitals, her entrepreneurial zeal.
In LA, Saldaya bounced around jobs: infant massage therapist, waitress, trimming marijuana for cash, a hula-hoop performer and in the office of a home birth midwife. Friends recall her ambition to be rich. “She wanted to have a big voice and be an activist,” one says, “but she was also oriented towards making money.”
From 2010 on, Saldaya worked as a doula, providing emotional and practical, but not medical, support to women giving birth. She would later say she was “haunted” by the traumatic births she saw in hospitals, many of which she perceived to be sexual assaults.
A committed feminist at the time, Saldaya joined a non-profit, the LA Doula Project, providing free doulas to low-income women. Through it, she met fellow doula Laura Garland. “She would do anything for her clients,” Garland recalls. “She was very protective, a fighter.” But Garland also says Saldaya had a tendency to exaggerate how many births she’d been to, sharing stories of births attended by other doulas as if she’d been there herself.
Saldaya had hoped to train as a midwife, but came to believe licensed midwives were part of the problem, promising women a hands-off birth, only to “sabotage” this by transferring them to hospital, in her opinion unnecessarily. She began falling in love with unassisted birth, and quickly had it all mapped out: a business, promoting freebirth. She’d launch with a podcast, then offer courses, online schools, retreats, even a festival.
On 1 May 2017, the podcast went live. It was a success, and downloaded 10,000 times in three months. But there was a problem: Saldaya had never had a freebirth herself. Her thoughts turned to how to legitimize her burgeoning venture. Garland remembers her saying, “There’s this woman in Canada who is amazing. I’m obsessed with her, and I’m going to make her my best friend.” In New Brunswick, Yolande Norris-Clark was about to receive a phone call that would change her life.
* * *
Saldaya’s call came at a good time. Reluctantly Norris-Clark had just taken a marketing job and enrolled her oldest children in school. Her self-described “wild days” – home schooling, making art, baking and walking barefoot through the woods – were over.
Born Yolande Norris into an upper middle-class family in the affluent suburb of Point Grey, Vancouver, medicine also ran in Norris’s family. Her grandfather, Prof John MacKenzie Norris, was a medical historian widely acknowledged as a world expert in the history of infectious diseases such as cholera and plague.
In her early 20s, she had two children with her first husband, both delivered at home by famed underground midwife Gloria Lemay, who inspired her interest in birth. Lemay is awaiting trial for manslaughter, after a baby died following a birth she attended in 2024. (Lemay has denied the charge.)
In 2005, aged 24, Norris separated from her husband, leaving her young sons with him. She met and married Lee Clark, a ceramic artist, and by the time she and Saldaya connected in 2017, the Canadian social media influencer had seven children, five freebirthed at home. (She is currently pregnant with her 11th child.)
If it was freebirthing credibility Saldaya was looking for, Norris-Clark had it in abundance. She was, at this point, a minor celebrity in the online birth world, due to her popular blog and the fact that a 2012 video she’d shared of her son’s freebirth on YouTube had gone viral.
“I figured out,” Saldaya would later say to Norris-Clark, in a 2022 podcast, “how to make myself valuable to you … [by making] us a bunch of money.” In return, Norris-Clark would bring her experience “of being an authentic midwife”.
But Norris-Clark was not a midwife. “We were never midwives,” says Lily Smallwood, 40, a nurse from Fredericton and former friend. “We did not have skills.” Smallwood and Norris-Clark connected around 2013 because they lived locally and had freebirthed their children. The two women began attending local births together, Smallwood assisting Norris-Clark, who she thought had greater expertise due to the fact that she’d taken a doula training course under Lemay in Vancouver.
Always careful never to advertise her services as a midwife, Norris-Clark instead called herself a traditional birth attendant, charging up to $3,000 to attend births, considerably more than a doula would command. (Smallwood was occasionally gifted the equivalent of a doula fee.)
When Saldaya and Norris-Clark connected in 2017, Norris-Clark claimed in her blog she’d been “present at hundreds of births”. “I’d be floored if there were hundreds,” Smallwood says – the New Brunswick unassisted birth scene was “very underground, very quiet”. She estimates Norris-Clark attended between a dozen and 20 births between 2013 and 2016.
Although, Smallwood says, Norris-Clark found it a “little rich” that Saldaya had set up a business promoting freebirth when she had never done it herself, the timing was opportune. She agreed to share transcripts for a book she’d been working on; this became The Complete Guide to Freebirth. To date, it has made more than $5m.
In January 2018, Saldaya attempted her first freebirth. Supported by her sister, a friend who was a nurse and training to be a nurse-midwife, and Johnny, her husband, who worked in the cannabis industry, Saldaya labored at home for 50 hours. She then transferred to the hospital, where she had a procedure to push back her cervical lip. Afterwards she returned home and gave birth to her daughter. Privately, friends say she was shaken – as she’d transferred to hospital, it wasn’t a true freebirth. But publicly she claimed victory. “It was epic,” she would later say in a podcast.
* * *
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”.
After Norris-Clark tacked rightwards politically, Saldaya followed. She began to promote wild pregnancy, a term Norris-Clark invented, meaning pregnancy without any prenatal care, and German New Medicine, which Norris-Clark has championed, which claims that disease is caused not by pathogens but by unresolved emotional conflicts.
Together, the pair developed a dogmatic approach at odds with the wider unassisted birth community, whose members attend medical appointments, seek ultrasounds to help them make informed choices and have emergency plans. When Coghill freebirthed back in 2020, she prepared a binder for her husband, with information about what to do in case of complications.
By contrast, FBS taught that even contemplating a back-up plan was a sign of moral failure, because the truly sovereign woman trusted birth. “You have to choose one world or the other,” Norris-Clark told followers in a video call. “And if you’re setting up a medical team in the room next door, you’re not getting the best of both worlds. You’re choosing the medical world.”
* * *
As her empire grew, Saldaya contemplated how to further monetize a practice that is, by definition, free. She knew not every woman who followed FBS was ready to freebirth alone. But in most jurisdictions, practicing midwifery without a license was illegal. “In order to maneuvre around these unjust laws, I made up the term radical birth keeper … to be crystal clear, a radical birth keeper is, in practice, [an] authentic midwife,” she told her followers. In 2020 she trademarked “Radical Birth Keepers”: its registration states it provides education and coaching services in “midwifery”.
The first Radical Birth Keeper (RBK) school opened in 2020 and, despite its $6,000 cost, sold out. Over the next five years, it would train more than 850 “authentic midwives” from every continent. In 2024, Saldaya and Norris-Clark went one step further, launching the MatriBirth Midwifery Institute (MMI), a $12,000, year-long “gold-standard online intensive midwifery school”.
In reality, American midwives study for years at the feet of elder midwives, who train them in how to resolve life-threatening birth complications. Most carry drugs to stop hemorrhages, know how to assist delivery of the placenta and train in neonatal resuscitation.
FBS students, on the other hand, would learn from an online course, taught via Zoom. The RBK school was only three months long, and much of the content was about how to build and market a business and find clients online. While Norris-Clark and Saldaya did acknowledge there were some genuine emergencies that would warrant transfer to a hospital, mostly these were played down and students were taught it was not for them to play the “hero” and keep their clients safe. The freebirthing mother takes radical responsibility for her birth, including, if necessary, her death. But some of the women who hired FBS-trained Radical Birth Keepers for between $3,000 and $5,000 dollars – comparable to what real midwives would charge – did not realize they were hiring women with no life-saving skills until it was too late. They believed they were hiring midwives.
To avoid legal jeopardy, Saldaya and Norris-Clark taught their students to accept cash gifts only after a successful birth, never to sign contracts and to avoid the sort of women who might blame them if a birth went wrong. “You will interact with babies not making it through their births,” Saldaya warned her students in one video call, adding, “People turn real fast.” If RBKs transferred with clients to the hospital, Saldaya told them to give a fake name. If the police were called to a baby’s death, Saldaya advised, “You just play dumb, sweet, innocent neighbor.”
When 42-year-old mother of one Keelee Sullivan, from California, signed up for the RBK school in 2023, she borrowed $6,000 from a family member, telling him, as she believed, it was “for midwifery school”. After the first birth she attended ended in hospital, Sullivan realised she’d been “practicing delusional optimism” and “was not educated or prepared” to be a midwife: “And no, I am not willing to go to jail.” She has not attended any births since.
Saldaya and Norris-Clark always insisted that being a Radical Birth Keeper isn’t illegal. “You are not practicing medicine,” Saldaya told her students. But privately, Norris-Clark mocked medical disclaimers. “Always consult your licensed certified medical professional,” she laughed in one call with her students. “This is for entertainment, informational, artistic purposes only. Yeah, it’s all just performance art, right?”
Molly Flam, 34, a doula from Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, who attended MMI, FBS’s flagship midwifery school, described it as “a scam”. She paid $9,000, only to find the pre-recorded videos were rambling and unprofessional, and contained medical advice that was inaccurate and confusing. “They’re showing up to classes dishevelled, talking about their personal lives,” Flam says. “There was no structure.”
From 2020-2025, FBS ran nine RBK schools and at least one MMI school, generating more than $4m in sales. At one stage in 2024, FBS was making up to $160,000 a month, according to one former employee.
As the money poured in, Saldaya established what she called her “queendom”. She bought three pieces of land in Hayesville, including a four-bed house in eight acres of land, an adjacent 53-acre plot and a school, set in 17 acres, that she spent tens of thousands renovating, only for it to fail a year later. She spent more than $10,000 on lawn ornaments, including giant toadstools, for the school and festival. She bought a Range Rover. She spent over $100,000 on a swimming pool and outdoor kitchen in her back yard. During this period, one friend recalls Saldaya asking for advice on how to get a private jet.
It had long been her ambition to buy land and build a community, so, at her invitation, around 13 families are believed to have moved to Hayesville, sometimes working for FBS and living in yurts on her property. By 2023, so many high-profile employees had fallen out with Saldaya, insiders called them her “fallen soldiers”.
Serendipiti Day, who had watched Saldaya wear a crown in the meadow in 2021, was one of those employees who had ended up disillusioned with FBS. She’d found the group after attending underground births in her community. She paid $300 to become a member in 2020 – a vast sum of money for Day, then an anarchist without health insurance – and her intellect and radical feminism marked her out. Saldaya asked her to lead Zoom calls and sent coaching clients her way. Quickly Day was making more money than she’d ever earned in her lifetime.
As its client base expanded, FBS grew more extreme. Within the Lighthouse, women came to understand wild pregnancies were the goal. An unofficial hierarchy of birth emerged, with C-sections at the bottom and freebirth at the top. If partners were hostile, Saldaya suggested women freebirth in hotels. She compared family members who didn’t support it to homophobic parents. Anti-midwife rhetoric escalated, too. “You’re fingering women in birth,” Saldaya said of midwives in a call with Lighthouse members. “Go fuck yourself.”
For all the money Saldaya was making, and her public image as a champion of women, privately she had grown weary of those in her community. When an Instagram follower asked why Lighthouse membership cost $500, Saldaya vented via text to a freelance employee. “That idiot bitch,” she wrote, “asked me where the money went. Where does the money from your job go?”
* * *
When women’s births didn’t go to plan, Norris-Clark and Saldaya offered paid sessions to unpack what went wrong. Neither woman had any training in grief or trauma counselling. On 20 May 2024, Camille Voitot logged on for a Zoom call with Norris-Clark from Frontignan, in the south of France. Voitot was barely functioning. Two weeks previously, her son Marlow had died during a freebirth.
Voitot, 35, a therapist, found FBS after searching for birth options when she began fertility treatment with her wife, Jo, in February 2023. Voitot has always been the sort of person to do her own research, rather than just accepting what people tell her to do. “I wanted a natural birth,” Voitot explains at their house meters from the beach, an inviting space full of plants and art. “I wanted my body and my baby to be respected.”
Throughout 2023, Voitot listened to the FBS podcast daily. She came to see Saldaya and Norris-Clark as the big sisters she’d never had. Growing up, Voitot did not have a close relationship with her mother, and she craved the sort of wisdom that once would have been passed down by elder women in her community.
When she got pregnant in August, Voitot found out home birth wasn’t covered by state insurance, meaning she’d have to pay €900 for a midwife, which felt unfair. After purchasing The Complete Guide to Freebirth, and Norris-Clark’s book, she decided to freebirth.
Jo had concerns, but told Voitot it was her choice. She knew Voitot had previously struggled with feelings of shame and trauma related to her sexuality, and wanted to support her. Friends were also worried – they would later tell Voitot they “didn’t recognise” her. But by then she believed “this is the safest way to give birth” without the risk of “obstetric violence” in a hospital.
After Marlow died, Voitot became consumed by the need to speak to Saldaya and Norris-Clark. She couldn’t afford the $350 Saldaya charged for an hour-long call, but Norris-Clark agreed to a reduced fee of $150.
On this call, Norris-Clark told Voitot her son’s death was not necessarily a bad thing. “There’s an overall assumption that death is the wrong outcome,” she said. “And I don’t think that can really ever be true.”
At the time, Voitot did not fully comprehend what Norris-Clark was saying. “I was so amazed by the fact that I could speak to her directly that I didn’t really hear what she said.”
As the months passed after Marlow’s death, Voitot began to have questions. Why, in all the time she’d listened to the podcast, had she never heard stories from mothers who lost their babies following freebirths and now regretted it? Why did she believe “you can only have a positive outcome”?
She reached out to Norris-Clark for a second debrief. This time it cost $800.
The two women spoke on 29 September 2025. The call quickly grew miserable and tense. Voitot asked Norris-Clark: how could she have said that death was not necessarily a bad outcome?
“This idea of death being bad is not really something I believe is true,” Norris-Clark said. “But that doesn’t mean I think it’s not a big deal.” She acknowledged she’d never lost a newborn baby of her own. “It’s a terrible thing, yeah,” she said. “And also, not ‘bad’, you know?”
They circled around a question that has played on Voitot’s mind over the last year. Did Norris-Clark take any responsibility for influencing her to freebirth?
Norris-Clark seemed irritable, though she stayed civil. Her answer was no. “People are responsible for their own decisions and their actions. You could have read other books. You could have gone on other websites. I am so sorry about your experience, Camille, but you are a woman that I don’t know, who lives in France.”
* * *
By 2024, it was becoming increasingly hard to deny how many babies were dying to FBS mothers. Deaths followed a pattern. First-time mothers – whose pregnancies are known to be higher-risk – attempting freebirths over many days, even a week, after wild pregnancies. Some women went to more than 44 weeks of pregnancy.
Most women who freebirth will have positive outcomes, and for healthy mothers the risks are low. But the radical version of freebirth Saldaya and Norris-Clark pioneered caused alarm even among freebirth advocates.
Most concerning was FBS guidance around the resuscitation of newborn babies. On the one hand, FBS courses gave basic advice for an emergency, though experts say their instructions were flawed. But Saldaya and Norris-Clark also claimed resuscitation was often an unnecessary act which deprived babies of the chance to choose to begin their lives. In her book, Norris-Clark called it “meddling” and “sabotage”. Babies, Saldaya said in a 2024 podcast, “need to learn how to breathe on their own”, adding, “It is so profound to marinate on this idea of your baby walking with this story at his back or her back, that she knew how to get born. And she claimed her breath.”
If an FBS-trained birth keeper was attending a birth, Saldaya and Norris-Clark taught that it was for the mothers, not the birth keeper, to decide if or how to help an infant unable to breathe. “When I attend a birth,” said Saldaya, on a 2024 podcast, “like, for example, I would never resuscitate a baby. That’s cuckoo bananas to me.”
In 2025, Saldaya taught her students about a birth she attended in which the baby did not breathe after it was born for “a couple of minutes”. She found the experience challenging, she said, because she was still unlearning her societal conditioning “to want to hear the baby breathe”. Despite her unease, she did nothing and merely watched. “There’s nothing for me to do,” she said. “I’m not going to resuscitate someone else’s baby. I’m not going to make calls for someone else’s baby.”
But exhausted mothers may not recognise that their babies are in respiratory distress until it’s too late. Or their intuition can be scrambled by exposure to FBS content. Just a few minutes of oxygen deprivation at birth can be fatal. If children survive, they may sustain lifelong brain injuries, like Esau Lopez. Milder forms may not be apparent for months or even years.
Should parents decline to seek medical help, that was their call. “For some women, giving birth to a severely compromised baby at home and allowing that baby to die with dignity in the arms of their family who love them is a reasonable outcome,” Saldaya told her students.
The notion of allowing a child to die is thorny legal terrain. “Parents are legally required to seek medical attention if a newborn is sick or struggling to survive,” says Prof Warren Binford, a children’s rights expert at the University of Colorado. “If a child dies because the parents fail to get medical care, they can be prosecuted for manslaughter, homicide, even murder.” The same principle applies to anyone else present who fails to seek help.
Saldaya and Norris-Clark practised what they preached. 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.”
Both Norris-Clark and Saldaya’s children survived. But Saldaya, who taught her followers to always have a “death plan”, had considered what she’d say to the authorities if a child of hers died after they were born. She’d pretend the baby was stillborn. “I would certainly lie,” Saldaya told her students in 2023. “If my baby was born alive, then died, and then I involved the police – that baby was born dead.”
If a child died in a freebirth, Saldaya also taught her students not to “kneejerk” call 911: “Dead is dead.” If grieving families chose to illegally bury their children on their land, Saldaya passed on advice once given to her by an underground midwife: “Dig a little deeper.”
After working closely with Saldaya for two years, in 2023 Day left what she calls a “death cult”.
FBS is not, by any conventional definition, a cult. But former FBS members often use the language of high-control groups to describe the hold they say they felt the organization had over them, leading them to behave in ways they now find hard to understand.
It is hard to quantify exactly how many babies have died in FBS circles, because many “loss moms”, as they’re known, disappear in the wake of their tragedies. Most do not respond to journalistic inquiries.
Within the Lighthouse alone, around eight women appear to have experienced stillbirths or neonatal deaths in the last year, in a community of around 600 women, many of whom were not pregnant.
As part of this Guardian investigation, we conducted in-depth interviews with 18 mothers who suffered late-term stillbirths, neonatal deaths or other incidents of serious harm after they or their birth attendants were heavily influenced by FBS. Their accounts were corroborated through interviews with friends, family and partners, and supported by journal entries, medical notes, video footage, message threads or legal documents. In all 18 cases, the evidence suggests FBS played a significant role in the mother or birth attendant’s decision-making, leading to potentially avoidable tragedies.
They include Adair Arbor, who never would have considered an unassisted birth before encountering FBS, and whose daughter, Ilex, was stillborn in January 2021 following a 115-hour labor, and Amalia Hernandez, who nearly bled to death in March 2024 after refusing to call an ambulance, believing her post-partum bleeding would resolve itself at home. The same year, Haley Bordeaux went blind and suffered several strokes following a four-day labor in which she was in contact with Saldaya, in phone calls and text messages via a friend. When Saldaya was later informed that doctors had concluded Bordeaux’s temporary vision loss was due to severe pre-eclampsia, she replied: “She doesn’t have severe pre e[clampsia], that’s so entirely retarded.”
We identified a further 30 cases, almost all late-term stillbirths or neonatal deaths, in which mothers appear to have been influenced by FBS, according to interviews with reporters, posts on Lighthouse or social media, or appearances on FBS or other podcasts. Most of the cases of harm relate to mothers in the US and Canada, but they also included births in Switzerland, France, South Africa, Thailand, India, Australia, the UK and Israel.
“There’s this cycle,” says one ex-Lighthouse member, whose baby was stillborn in 2024. “Children die. It’s known in the community for a time, then new members come into the Lighthouse, and they’re forgotten. It’s like the erasure of our children.”
* * *
In December 2024, a frantic-looking Norris-Clark appeared by video call from a hotel room. She announced to the students in the Matribirth Midwifery Institute that she was an “international fugitive”, after a freebirth she’d attended in Nicaragua had gone wrong. After the mother was unable to birth her placenta, she began to bleed heavily, before having a seizure. Paramedics were called. Afterwards, “there was swearing and screaming and people threatening me”, Norris-Clark said. She briefly fled the country, saying she would no longer be attending births, because she did not want to go to jail. When she’d launched the flagship MMI programme with Saldaya in September 2024, Norris-Clark told her students she was “fulfilling one of the central purposes of my life, by teaching midwifery”. Now, three months later, this U-turn.
One of Norris-Clark’s MMI students was a 23-year-old pregnant first-time mother from Australia. She was having a wild pregnancy, with no prenatal care. On 5 March 2025, she posted in the Lighthouse to say she’d been in labor for five days and was “exhausted and hitting a wall of confusion”. Saldaya responded: “Sounds so normal and so hard. Baby is coming. You can do it.”
On day eight, the mother posted “still going”; on day nine, “belly is taking on a strange shape as I contract, sort of like 2 bulges”. She was describing a Bandl’s ring, a sign of obstructed labor, an emergency in all medical settings. But nobody told her to go to the hospital.
The mother subsequently posted a video of her son. He is grunting and struggling to breathe, his chest retracting effortfully. “Hey y’all,” the mother wrote, “just wondering if this sounds normal for a sleeping newborn?” Members expressed concern, but still no one told her to call emergency services immediately.
“With a broken heart,” the mother subsequently posted, “I want to share that baby boy didn’t make it.”
It was this video of a dying baby that finally prompted a mass outpouring of shock and revulsion in the FBS community. Days later, on 16 March 2025, a Reddit community formed. r/FreebirthSocietyScam was set up to “help deprogram from the mind control, culty atmosphere and rigid dogma of FBS”.
On 27 March an MMI student posted inside a private chat for fellow students. “I would like to know,” she wrote, “why it has not been addressed that a woman in this space, in our current cohort, lost her baby … no one encouraged her to seek medical attention asap, even though it was clearly a medical emergency.”
Saldaya deleted her post, before ejecting her from the course. Over the coming weeks, 13 students would leave, or be kicked out, of MMI.
Saldaya and Norris-Clark appeared to have concerns about the legal consequences of what they were doing. In May FBS posted a disclaimer on Instagram, claiming its content was for “educational and informational” purposes and was not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any medical condition related to pregnancy or birth. “For medical advice, consult your healthcare provider.” In a call with her remaining students after the Reddit community formed, Saldaya admitted “[we] overplayed our hand, calling this a midwifery school”.
FBS did not respond to requests for comment, however, in recent months Saldaya and Norris-Clark have pivoted to describing themselves as online educators, training “birth mentors”; MMI has been renamed the MatriBirth Mentor Institute. There are signs that the business duo may be parting ways: Norris-Clark was recently scrubbed from the FBS website homepage, which has been redesigned to put Saldaya front and center.
On Instagram, Norris-Clark has called critics of FBS “pathetic losers”, defending her partnership with Saldaya as “the most ethical kind of business you can run”.
In a statement on her Instagram account, Saldaya rejected the depiction of herself as “some manipulative cult leader” and compared the negative publicity to “advertising” that “has brought me a wave of new followers”.
“Let me be clear: I don’t care if you freebirth,” she said. “I don’t encourage strangers on the internet to do anything at all. You are an adult. You’ve got some big decisions to make. It’s important to know freebirth is an option; what option you choose is up to you … I speak what is true for me, from a lifetime of devotion to understanding birth and the toxic power dynamics of the industrial birth system,” she added. “I stand righteously in my values. In a world where mothers and babies are routinely abused in birth, I will always stand with my whole heart for women finding their own way. And yes – turns out many of them prefer to give birth at home, like I do.”
In a call with her students, Saldaya described the Reddit community as “a little troll group”. On 8 August, in her ninth month of a wild pregnancy with her third child, she uploaded a podcast with Norris-Clark, discussing the 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 MMI 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.”
• To listen to The Birth Keepers podcast series, subscribe to The Guardian Investigates feed, and it will drop in automatically when it launches in December. Additional reporting by Elizabeth Cassin, Olivia Lee, Joshua Kelly, Lucy Hough, Tom Wall, Joseph Smith, Philip McMahon.
