Over a weekend in late June 2024, Emilee Saldaya, the leader of the Free Birth Society, hosted a festival on her 21-hectare (53-acre) property in North Carolina. It was a celebratory gathering for FBS, a multimillion-dollar business that promotes a radical approach to giving birth without medical support.
Promotional footage from the Matriarch Rising festival shows Saldaya dancing beside her private lake, wearing a crown. That same weekend, more than 3,000 miles away, in Dundalk, a town on the east coast of Ireland, Naomi James, bled to death after freebirthing her son.
It is impossible to say with any certainty whether James would have survived if a midwife or doctor had been present. Neither is it possible to know exactly how influential FBS was on James’s decision-making, although she appears to have been scarred by bad experiences with maternity services.
Yet the 38-year-old photographer’s social media accounts shed light on the milieu of content she was consuming during her pregnancy, which was considered high risk because of her two previous caesarean sections.
On 21 February 2024, James liked a post captioned “freebirth rocks” that was hashtagged #freebirthsociety. The following month, she appears to have been recommended an FBS podcast called “The Freebirther’s Guide to Hemorrhage with Yolande Norris-Clark” by her doula. “Definitely one to listen to,” wrote the doula in a comment, which tagged James, beneath the episode on Instagram.
It is not known whether James listened to the episode, in which Saldaya said that while she had seen “tonnes of haemorrhage manufactured in the hospital” as a result of unnecessary interventions, she had never seen a haemorrhage in a free birth.
“From what I know to be true,” said Saldaya, “I have never once, not one time, seen or heard of a situation where a mother died from any complications at home, but specifically we’re talking about blood loss.” Three months later, on 23 June 2024, James died of a postpartum haemorrhage after her free birth.
An investigation by the Guardian last week found 48 cases of late-term stillbirths or neonatal deaths or other forms of serious harm involving mothers or birth attendants who appear to be linked to FBS. The tally includes two women in the US who nearly bled to death after haemorrhaging following free births.
Most of the cases relate to mothers in the US and Canada, but also include births in Switzerland, France, South Africa, India, Australia and the UK.
Experts in birth who reviewed FBS content for the Guardian said it included information that was “misleading” or “dangerous”, including in relation to the risk of haemorrhage.
Last Tuesday, the Guardian revealed that the NHS has been directing pregnant women contemplating a “free birth” to an online factsheet that linked to FBS podcasts, describing them as a source of “empowering stories” that can help British women “preparing for their own birth”. The web page was run by the Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services (Aims), a charity, which has now removed the reference from its website, saying it was “not aware of the serious concerns” associated with FBS.
Saldaya has not responded substantively to repeated requests for comment. In a reply to an email listing 35 questions (one of which related to James), Saldaya said “some of these allegations are false or defamatory”. She did not respond to requests for further clarification.
James’s brother Adam Boyle, 39, said he believed his sister was “radicalised” by influencers, and there was nothing “anyone could have done” to change her mind about her birth plan. “She so firmly believed in what these influencers said, and her ability to do her own research,” he said.
Like many women drawn to FBS, it appears that James had previously experienced poor maternity care.
James wrote in online free birth groups about having been denied her choices by medical providers in previous pregnancies. When she was in labour during a previous pregnancy, James wrote, medical staff had refused to let her use a birthing pool because they considered her to be high-risk due to her body mass index.
It appears that freebirthing may not have been James’s first choice. “For me,” James wrote, “I’m having a free birth because it’s my only option to have a HBA2C [home birth after two C-sections].”
In March 2024, she posted in a free birth Facebook group to say that a doctor had laughed at her when she told them she planned to have a vaginal birth after two previous caesarean sections.
This disrespectful treatment, she wrote, made her feel “so frustrated”, and consequently she stopped attending many appointments. James wrote: “These encounters, although so hard and frustrating at the time, make me more determined to fight for myself and other women. I want a better system for my daughter one day.”
As she disengaged from maternity services, she sought information online, participating in a “clubhouse”, a private, online birth discussion group, led by Kemi Johnson, one of the most prominent birth influencers in the UK. A former midwife turned “birth keeper”, Johnson has deregistered from the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) and amassed 42,000 followers on Instagram, where she routinely excoriates NHS maternity services.
James attended Johnson’s online discussion on 5 March 2024, according to posts she made on Facebook. James wrote afterwards: “I am confident in my choice and I’m excited for the journey.”
James leaves behind a husband and four children. “I grieve not just her loss as my sister,” said Boyle, “but all the milestones in her children’s lives, where her absence will be so deeply felt.” He added that James had plans for how she’d celebrate each child as they grew up. “To know that she won’t be here to make those moments so special is such a loss.”
In 2022, Johnson appeared on the FBS podcast. She told Saldaya she referred British women to FBS, telling them: “You need to see all the twin pregnancies and the breech babies falling out of women.”
Much like Saldaya, Johnson has a record of inflammatory language when discussing maternity services. In response to a post about mothers who freebirth being investigated by child protective services (CPS), Johnson said parents who choose to give birth in hospital should be referred to CPS for “ignoring the iatrogenic [medically induced] harm being caused to themselves and their baby”. She has labelled doctors “knobstetricians” and alleged that the UK has “very rapey maternity services”.
James was active in a number of other home and free birth Facebook groups while pregnant with her fourth child. But Johnson, in particular, appears to have left a mark on James. As well as attending Johnson’s private birth discussion, she interacted enthusiastically with her content on social media.
During her pregnancy, James liked 15 Instagram posts by Johnson, some of which were about mothers who, like herself, were rejecting medical advice and choosing to freebirth. James also recommended Johnson to other mothers considering their options. On 28 February 2024, James commented: “❤️🙌👏❤️” under a post by Johnson about a “badass”, “queen” mother who had freebirthed after a C-section and revision surgery.
Contacted for comment by the Guardian, Johnson did not respond.
There is almost no data available on free birth, although anecdotally many midwives report seeing a rise in the number of women giving birth without any medical support.
Reign Lawrence, 39, a railway worker, was browsing Instagram in 2021 when she came across Norris-Clark, Saldaya’s business partner. “I liked her articulateness and confidence,” said Lawrence, who lives in Dudley, in the West Midlands.
Lawrence said she did not engage with FBS content, but she followed Norris-Clark, a leader of the group, on social media and later joined her private membership for £37.50 a month. At the time, Lawrence was a student midwife. “I wanted to get into their system to try to improve it,” she said. “I was a super-idealistic little student midwife.”
But by the time she became pregnant in October 2021, Lawrence said she had become disillusioned with the NHS. She had seen mothers receiving what she felt were unnecessary interventions, and being talked about disparagingly by staff.
Norris-Clark, she said, was “very influential” in affirming her decision to have an unassisted birth, although she stresses the decision was her own. In May 2022, Lawrence freebirthed twin boys in a hotel room in Jamaica. The youngest twin died shortly after birth; his older brother survived and is now a thriving and happy toddler.
There is no way of knowing if the outcome would have been different in a medically supervised birth. As soon as she noticed her son was in distress, Lawrence said she took him to hospital.
Lawrence said she did not regret freebirthing, but wished she had been given more options. “The maternity care system is so one-size-fits-all and so you kind of go, well, I don’t want what they’re offering, so what am I to do?”
The Guardian is aware of at least three other British women who lost babies after following FBS or other radical free birth influencers.
UK authorities are wrestling with how to respond to the apparent rise in freebirthing.
In April 2025, the national network of designated health professionals, a committee of NHS doctors and nurses responsible for child safeguarding, published a position statement urging the government to legislate for the mandatory examination of a child by a health professional within 24 hours of birth, which does not always happen at present.
“Women make a really careful choice to freebirth,” said Dr Joanne Nicholl, who co-authored the statement. “And they’ve absolutely got their child’s best wishes at heart.”
But parents, she said, might not always realise their babies were unwell. “There are some conditions that aren’t obvious to a parent when a child’s born, but can be picked up by a healthcare professional.” Nicholl gave the examples of low thyroid levels, which can lead to brain injury, and congenital heart disease, which can be fatal.
“It’s not about curtailing their choices around free birth,” Nicholl added. “It’s saying: ‘Let’s just let someone have a little look at your child, check them over.’”
Free birth is legal in the UK. It is also legal to provide emotional and practical support to a woman in labour, whether in a paid capacity as a doula, or as a family member, partner or friend. But it is illegal to “claim to be, or to practise” as a midwife if you are not on the NMC register.
To manoeuvre around these sorts of regulations, Saldaya made up the term “radical birth keeper”, or RBK. “To be crystal clear, a radical birth keeper is, in practice, [an] authentic midwife,” she said in 2025. FBS’s Radical Birth Keeper School, a three-month course conducted via Zoom, has 850 graduates around the world.
To avoid legal jeopardy, Saldaya tells students that she accepts cash “gifts” only after a successful birth, does not sign contracts and avoids women who might blame them if a birth goes wrong.
In the UK, there are at least 13 FBS-accredited working birth keepers, according to a paid-for directory seen by the Guardian. It is not clear whether they are attending births or what services they provide, and there is no evidence they are breaking the law.
The Guardian is aware of one FBS-accredited birth keeper who appears attuned to the legal risks. She offers an online course for fellow birth attendants who want to support freebirthing women “without fear” of getting into trouble with the authorities. One session explores the law in the UK and “how to take sensible steps to protect yourself”.
She posted on Instagram recently that she used to obsessively delete messages to her clients, insist only on payment after their babies were born, tell clients not to disclose her name to medical professionals, and told one client that were she to experience a birth emergency, she would not go to hospital with them.
Contacted by the Guardian, she did not respond to a request for comment. She told followers recently she created her course because she felt that a lot of what she’d learned in FBS’s RBK school was incomplete and unhelpful.
Norris-Clark also declined requests for comment. Saldaya has previously said she does not “encourage strangers on the internet to do anything at all”. Norris-Clark has called critics of FBS “pathetic losers”, defending her partnership with Saldaya as “the most ethical kind of business you can run”. On 22 November, the day the Guardian published its investigation into FBS, 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.”
