I am becoming increasingly concerned whenever I see the word ‘influencer’ associated with someone on the internet. It is a vaguely defined terms and a brief search yields examples such as “one who exerts influence : a person who inspires or guides the actions of others” or “a person who is able to generate interest in something (such as a consumer product) by posting about it on social media” or “a person who has become well known through regular social media posts and is able to promote a product or service by recommending or using it online.”
I would like to add a further definition as “someone who has no real expertise or credentials about whatever they are talking about but are using their own experience or those of a few others to make sweeping claims that others should follow their advice even when that can be dangerous”.
I don’t really care about influencers who advise people about restaurants or hotels or vacation spots or what cleaning and cooking utensils to buy. Sure, the advice may be useless and they are likely being paid to shill for those things. But those are usually harmless and only result in a loss of money for the gullible. I am more concerned about those who give medical advice about treating ailments or who promote diets that can be harmful if continued for a long time.
One of the more dangerous influencers that I read about recently was in an investigative series by reporters from the Guardian newspaper promoting something called ‘free births’. To be clear, these are not so-called natural or unassisted births where women choose to give birth at home under the guidance of midwives and doulas who are able to quickly summon medical help if something goes seriously wrong with the delivery. (A midwife is a trained medical professional who knows how to deliver babies while a doula is someone who has no medical training but provides non-medical emotional and moral support.)
The people behind the Free Birth Society are ex-doulas Emilee Saldaya and Yolande Norris-Clark and they deliberately shun any medical professional involvement at all. It has all the markings of a cult.
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.”
This is typical cult behavior, getting people to cut themselves off from those who might actually have their best interests at heart.
They promoted a pseudo-midwifery training course that is nowhere near as rigorous as traditional courses.
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.”
The reporters list five of their key findings.
1. Many FBS claims conflict with evidence-based medical advice
2. FBS is linked to real-world harm all around the world
3. Saldaya, the chief executive of FBS, directly advises women during birth
4. FBS profits from growing distrust in maternity services
5. The leaders of FBS seem undeterred by mounting criticism
#4 is a significant factor in attracting women to the FBS movement. American medical practice, highly corporatized and money-focused, can seem cold and uncaring and women who have had bad experiences with it in the past will naturally seek alternatives such as FBS even though it is so risky. The stories of births gone wrong and mothers and babies dying or suffering permanent damage were sickening to read.
To be clear, women have the right to choose what kind of delivery they want to have. I can understand how some might be attracted to the romantic idea of just going off the grid and dropping the baby the way they think that animals do all the time and that our ancestors did before modern medicine came along. I can also understand how women who in an earlier pregnancy had experienced bad treatment by the medical-hospital complex want to have nothing to do with it again. What is problematic is when they are marketed to with slick advertising that promises them that having a baby with not only no medical services during the pregnancy but also during delivery is easy, and explicitly advising them to reject creating any back up plan should things go wrong.
You can watch an interview with one of the reporters who wrote the story, who came across this movement when she was pregnant.
… dropping the baby the way they think that animals do all the time …
Which generally they do, not having oversized-brain babies like a certain bipedal species.
I suspect, without evidence or any idea how to obtain same, that the Genesis curse of “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children” derived from the observation that livestock deliver their young with (usually) much less pain and hazard than humans and the need to “understand” why.
I’m thinking this might be a small warning sign that these folks are delusional, and that they should be avoided:
After Norris-Clark decided she did not believe in gravity…
Perhaps she doesn’t believe in oxygen, either. After all, can’t see it, can’t smell it, can’t taste it. Must be a government hoax…
My own definition of an influencer is someone who is famous because they are famous, and because of that, strangely, some people will listen to them.
Much like with anti-vaxxers, freebirthers are blind to history. They feel so safe and comfortable because of how medical technologies have improved our lives, they’ve forgotten what life was like before those things were invented. Childbirth is one of the most dangerous experiences a human can have!
My son’s umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. Once the doctors figured this out, he was born by routine C-section, and both he and my wife are healthy and happy today. A few hundred years ago, they’d both have died.
I agree with Adam and add that this sounds like it’s another step in the “reality is anything I say it is” school of thinking much like the claim that the Covid vax has killed more children in the USA (serious guess is 0 -- 7) than died from Covid itself (estimated 2100). Or that swimming in water contaminated by sewage is perfectly fine and harmlessso long as the person can do a pull-up on a bar.
In my life, I’ve seen a slide in birth practices. It’s absolutely true that many women have been mistreated and harmed by the traditional medical practices. When I was a kid in the 1960s, there were doctors who would come to a woman’s house and attend a birth--these women would have had traditional medical care during their pregnancy and an obstetrician could certainly recognize medical complications and know when to call 9-1-1.
Then was the midwife trend, and there are absolutely medically-trained midwives and nurse-midwives who are perfectly safe to deliver a baby in an uncomplicated birth or call 9-1-1 in an emergency. But then a lot of the religious nutters latched onto the idea and it was one of the very few professions a woman could undertake in these communities as they trained each other.
The logical next step is training online, I guess? It’s absolutely terrifying to contemplate. Birth complications happen all the time, and with trained medical staff the chances of a positive result--like Adam’s wife and son--are much more likely than with some random woman who had a few hours of a zoom call.
im remembering the scene in conan the barbarian where james earl jones gets the girl to jump off a cliff just to make a point in conversation with arnold. i hate cult leaders.
A coroner’s court in Australia has recently been hearing a case of the death of a mother who was attended by a freebirther for her home delivery:
Melbourne nutrition influencer died from postpartum haemorrhage after freebirth, court hears
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-10/stacey-warnecke-free-birth-death-coroner-investigates/106124514
The coroner has not yet finished hearing evidence, so there are not any findings yet.
When you start getting secretive and deceptive like this, it means that you know that the society you live in and/or the legal system you operate under sees what you are doing is wrong. It doesn’t necessarily follow that what you are doing is actually wrong, and it’s pretty rare that someone does things which they “know are wrong” but just don’t care. That being said, if you’re scamming your clients, whether or not it counts as a scam in a legal sense, you might want to apply a very high level of scrutiny about whether you’ve really got a moral case here. “I believe it’s for their own good” should never be considered sufficient.
Though in this particular case, it seems to be motivated at least in part by anti-expertise ideology. “My ignorance and inexperience is better than your knowledge and skills”, basically.
The human pelvic opening is so small that our infants have to rotate to pass through it, and get quite bruised in the process of getting born. The number one cause of mortality for adult women before modern medicine was pregnancy and child birth. No humans have ever just gone off into the woods and ‘dropped’ a newborn. It takes supreme effort to push them out, and assistance greatly improves the chances that both mother and infant survive birth.
This women should be charged with practicing medicine without a license and depraved indifference to basic facts about childbirth.
@7 and 8: there’s a fantasy built up around giving birth that keeps getting repeated: that in Ye Goode Olde Days, REAL WOMEN squatted by the roadside, pushed out a baby, then went right back to foraging and doing the housework and raising the other children, only with the newborn in her arms (which mysteriously never stopped her from doing all the other stuff). Sarah Palin famously brought a premature, special-needs, hole-in-the-heart, feeding-tube-in-the-nose infant to work to cement her REAL WOMAN status. In fact, she hadn’t been pregnant and nobody is sure where she got the child-as-prop, but conservative America just ate up the mythology that their Caribou Barbie was a super-woman.
Any modern woman who said she couldn’t do that was just lazy and malingering. As a child, I saw a murder mystery program on tv where a barely-post-partum woman stopped a home invader and one police officer says admiring to another that HIS lazy wife insisted on being in bed the first day after giving birth, while this REAL WOMAN [did the police’s work for them].
This kind of dangerous nonsense resulted in women going into the office hours after giving birth to prove they were REAL WOMEN. Insurance companies also used this mythology to limit hospital stays: when I had my first child, the insurance company would consult their charts for time-of-day and time-entering-the-hospital to determine length of stay--a woman could be discharged as little as six hours after giving birth. Unlike the regular hospital rooms that held at most two patients, the maternity ward where I had my first held up to eight. The woman in the bed next to me had given birth via c-section and they’d forced her out ten hours later. But the surgeon had stitched part of her colon closed and she nearly died at home, so 48 hours after giving birth, she was back in the hospital, without her baby.
It’s not like the maternal mortality rate in the USA needs increasing. Looking at the UNICEF data for maternal mortality it is quite bad enough already.
@ rsmith; before, it was mostly the medical profession and the insurance companies harming women. Now, some women are harming themselves.
We’ve all read the stories about women with a life-threatening complication of pregnancy who are turned away by doctors who believe they’re faking it--and now, who don’t want to lose their license and go to jail for providing necessary medical help. But it goes much deeper, much further than that. There’s a history going back decades of women in preeclampsia who are ruled “drug-seeking” or “attention-seeking” when they report life-threatening symptoms to their medical team or ER staff. I once accompanied a friend and her husband to the ER and ended up threatening the ER staff with the police for homicide if they didn’t treat what turned out to be HELLP Syndrome (in the progression of complications, its preeclampsia --> eclampsia --> HELLP). Nobody can fake a bp of 250/180, yellow gums and eyes and lips, monstrous swelling, plus inability to speak coherently--and they certainly don’t do it for “attention”.
It’s orders-of-magnitudes more dangerous when they go it alone at home alone. Doctors are at least trained, capable, and equipped to handle medical emergencies if they’re forced to do it.
I don’t have a problem with choosing one of those worlds.
The Reality based one based on modern medicine and the knowledge we have accumulated over the last 1,000 years.
I’ve seen, after the fact, unattended home births that went wrong and resulted in a dead baby before.
Not recommended.
This is way far out on the lunatic fringes.
Yeah, human pregnancy and childbirth is not one of evolution’s showpiece success stories. Of course, not all, not even most, mothers and children have to survive, (and that is how historically it always was), only enough.
If some women wish to give birth without any medical supervision, they need to know the chances and seriousness of what complications might arise. This cult’s slick web presence tells women that every single complication is just “very rare”, deliberate misinformation that surely might make the leaders criminally and legally liable.
Childbirth and pre-natal care are two different things, too. Pre-natal care is, naturally, one of the medical advances that is most associated with lowering mortality rates, since the point is to monitor whether any complications are starting to appear, then nip them in the bud or prepare for special conditions during the rest of pregnancy and the delivery. I suppose these cult leaders discourage prenatal care because some women would be told that they are high-risk, and might succumb to evil medical childbirth, and then the cult would lose customers.
Must agree with Katydid @9, and 11, and also that many women’s experience with medically-supervised childbirth is not only cold and detached, but is completely inept, dismissive, mailcious, and sometimes horrible and traumatic. The surgeon’s mistake that Katydid describes is typical: the surgeon didn’t pay enough attention to distinguish a uterus from a colon? Would have taken a man’s surgery more seriously. Also, dismissing women in obvious trouble as “all in your head” is more than common. The article mentioned the accusation that some doctors have done un-announced, not-consented-to, episiotomies: don’t know if that’s true, but it’s plausible.
I suggest that, if doctors give a damn and wish to decrease the higher death rates of “free” birth, an excellent way to accomplish is to perform their jobs better, and not leave women feeling that even risking death would be preferable.
I notice, too, that these cult leaders are not immune: both had babies born in respiratory distress, which the mothers left untreated, although both babies had the luck to survive (with any permanent or long-term damage, we do not know.) But, one leader’s next baby was “stillborn”, a term that she openly advises others say as a protective lie if a child dies during, and because of, a “free” birth.
If they’re willing to gloss over the deaths of their own children, nothing will disabuse these two of the ideas that they did not arrive at by reason. But, they should *not* be allowed to spread them to others.
A friend reported that, during her post-MD residency, the doctors had sarcastic little stereotypes they’d say about every specialty: pediatricians were “the sweethearts of medicine”, “a surgeon’s hands are quick and nimble, a surgeon’s brains could fit in a thimble”, etc.
The one for OB-GYNS was “stupid people who hate women.” So, even the other doctors noticed.
During a friend’s first pregnancy, her baby suddenly died in utero at seven months: it was found that the placenta had suddenly started aging rapidly and no longer provided food and oxygen. When, a month later, she went for her check-up to the OB-GYN who had given her seven months of pre-natal care, and who’d supervised her care in hospital at the baby’s death. He walked smiling into the exam room and said “So! How’s your baby?” She had to remind him that hers was the one who died, so he got angry at her.
Once I lived directly across the street from the emergency room entrance of Columbia-Presbyterian medical center in Manhattan (the sirens were noisy, but the rent was low.) I always thought that, if anyone wanted to have a home birth, that apartment would be a good place. It even had an elevator that a guerny could fit in, ideal.
I see the problem there.
He.
Up until recently, for unfathomable reasons, almost all OB-GYNs were male while their patients were…female.
At our local megaclinic, the entire OB-GYN staff including the head are now women MDs.
Yeah. Misogyny is so baked in. Remember the furor the man-babies had over women overwhelmingly preferring to take their chances with a bear in the woods over a man in the woods because of the relentless abuse they’ve experienced from men? Some women prefer to take their chances giving birth alone because they’ve had such relentless abuse from the medical profession (with a dollop of “my ignorance is equal to your education”).
There’s also the complete delusion around medicine that’s become so pervasive. It’s disheartening to read the comments on any article about the Covid vaccine because they’re immediately swarmed by people spewing complete ignorant rubbish.
Unfortunately women doctors have often picked up the misogyny that too many male doctors have ingrained, just being female doesn’t guarantee a doctor will treat eg a woman’s pain as seriously as they treat a man’s pain.