‘Ignorant and life-threatening’: experts condemn Free Birth Society misinformation

The Free Birth Society (FBS) is a multimillion-dollar business that promotes the idea of women giving birth with no medical assistance. It is led by two ex-doulas turned social media influencers: Emilee Saldaya and Yolande Norris-Clark. Neither have midwifery or medical training, but they claim to have extensive experience from attending the births of other women. Through its successful podcast, Instagram account, private online community and online schools, FBS has gained a global following. An investigation by the Guardian has linked FBS content to infant deaths and serious maternal harm around the world. FBS did not respond to requests for comment. After publication of the Guardian’s investigation, Saldaya posted a statement on Instagram criticising “propaganda on mainstream news”. “This is what it means to be a disruptor,” she said. “They will try to discredit you. They will lie about you. They will attempt to silence what they don’t understand.” An FBS disclaimer published in May said its content was for “educational and informational” purposes and not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any medical condition related to pregnancy or birth. “For medical advice, consult your healthcare provider,” it added. Below, four medical experts respond to examples of FBS claims about pregnancy and birth. Norris-Clark told students enrolled in FBS’s MatriBirth Midwifery Institute (MMI) in 2025 that while she sterilised surgical scissors used for cutting umbilical cords out of respect for her clients, there was no risk of infection, even if you were to use an “old rusty fork”. “I don’t believe in germ theory,” she said, “But even if contagion were real … there would be a pretty much 0% chance of anything happening.”Soo Downe, a midwife and professor at the University of Lancashire, said this was very dangerous advice. Significant numbers of babies in low-income countries died every year of sepsis, she said, after having their cord cut with dirty instruments or sealed with substances such as used engine oil or non-sterile Vaseline. Asked by a student of MMI in 2024 what to do if remnants of a placenta remained inside a woman’s body days after she had given birth, and she had a fever, Saldaya suggested a husband or friend would be better suited to removing them than “some random ass pervert at a hospital”. “I’d be like: ‘Johnny, my husband, you’re going diving.’”Mary Littlefield, a home birth midwife from Texas with 25 years’ experience, said this was dangerous. Manual removal was not a “casual skill” that anyone could perform, she said; it carried a range of risks, including infection, perforation and haemorrhage. Such a procedure should be carried out by a qualified professional, she said, adding: The idea that a postpartum fever can be ignored is “ignorant and life-threatening”. Saldaya told listeners of the FBS podcast last year that some babies came out “screaming and pink” but others took five minutes or more to transition to breathing. She said she has heard of babies taking as long as 10 or 15 minutes to breathe.Downe said it was dangerous to suggest it was OK to leave a baby for 15 minutes without intervening. If a baby was not breathing within one minute, it was time to undertake resuscitation, she said. If a baby was still not breathing after five minutes, there was a high chance of long-term neurological damage. During a 2024 module of MMI (which has in recent months been renamed the MatriBirth Mentor Institute), Norris-Clark said her son was born “completely white, limp and lifeless”, but it did not cross her mind to resuscitate him. In her 2023 book, Portal, she described medical resuscitation as a “form of sabotage”. In an appearance on the Alec Zeck podcast in 2024, Saldaya said she would never resuscitate a baby when attending a birth and to do so would be “cuckoo bananas”. Dr Michelle Telfer, an associate professor of nursing at Yale who specialises in midwifery, said less than 1% of babies needed extensive resuscitation, such as chest compressions, to breathe at birth. However, as many as 15% needed some kind of assistance to breathe on their own, such as bag-and-mask ventilation or oral suction. These interventions, she said, were life-saving and “brain sparing”. Saldaya said in a module of The Complete Guide to Freebirth, which FBS has sold since 2018, that she couldn’t imagine a scenario in which she would seek medical attention for a urinary tract or kidney infection “because I’m just not ever going to take antibiotics while pregnant”. She said she felt the risk of using antibiotics outweighed any benefit.If left untreated, urinary tract or kidney infections could seriously harm the mother and baby, leading to, for example, premature birth, low birth-weight, or even sepsis. Downe said it was dangerous to suggest women should never take antibiotics and while she believed they had been overused in maternity care, they could be life-saving when there was a real need. Saldaya told FBS podcast listeners in 2024 that it was safe to deliver babies at home outside the time period medical guidance usually recommended (between 38 and 42 weeks). She said she knew of “plenty” of babies who were born at home as early as 33 weeks and “survive and thrive” without any medical intervention.A baby born at 33 weeks may not survive without urgent and intensive medical support. Littlefield said a non-hospital birth before 36 weeks could result in neurological damage or neonatal death due to a lack of lung maturity. In the Complete Guide to Freebirth, Saldaya told students not to worry about babies “born blue” because while “this can seem scary … actually a blue baby is an oxygenated baby!”Kenga Sivarajah, a lead obstetrician at King’s College hospital, in London, said this was false; a blue baby could have oxygen deprivation. Telfer agreed, warning that if a baby was born blue and no intervention was made, there was a high risk of asphyxiation and organ damage, including to the brain. (Blue hands and feet, however, were usually nothing to worry about, but babies with those symptoms should be observed closely.) In a module of The Complete Guide to Freebirth, Saldaya said mothers who were bleeding a lot and feeling light-headed after giving birth should clamp their umbilical cords, cut a small piece off the end and put it in their mouth to absorb the hormones. “This sounds disgusting,” she said, but could work to “staunch the bleeding”.Experts said there was no evidence to support this. Telfer said it was dangerous advice that was “just completely out there”. There were no bio-available hormones in a cord and this would do nothing to help with bleeding, she said. • The Birth Keepers, a multipart Guardian podcast series investigating the Free Birth Society, is released in December. (Subscribe now to The Guardian Investigates feed.) Additional reporting by Tom Wall