As many of you know, The Guardian recently came out with a series of articles and podcast episodes investigating The Freebirth Society (FBS) and its founders Emilee Saldaya and Yolande Norris Clark (if you don’t know, I recommend reading and listening before diving in here).
As a former FBS member, Radical Birthkeeper School (RBK) graduate, someone who freebirthed her second child, a presenter at the 2024 Matriarch Rising Festival, an author, and a woman passionate about encouraging other women to know themselves and reclaim their bodies, I feel compelled to bring some more nuance into the current conversation – both around freebirth and the Freebirth Society.
This is not a defense of or attack on anyone, but a critical look at what is being brought to light in the context of a number of much larger, intersecting systemic and psychological issues.
Fundamentally, I believe in a woman’s right to choose where and how she gives birth, her right to access accurate and unbiased information and her right to claim her own spiritual orientation and lens. I also believe in the importance of people in positions of leadership, influence and power – be it spiritual, medical or otherwise – fully owning the tremendous responsibility that comes with that.
Having been on the inside of the Freebirth Society, I wanted to cover as much ground as I could. It’s a lot of ground. I’m going to be deconstructing commonly held beliefs about birth and death, exploring the political atmosphere that got us here, as well as dissecting some of the cultish power dynamics that exist in FBS. It’s going to be long. So strap in! We’re going for a ride.
Because it’s where we all start, let’s start with birth.
Birth
I was born in what my mother has referred to as the best orgasm of her life. My mother gave birth to me standing up, held by my father who was facing her, his stomach against her belly, feeling every contraction that she was having against his own skin. I was born smiling (that rush must’ve felt really good to me too!), the caul encircling my head “like a little halo,” according to my mom.
This happened in 1983. In a hospital.
My mother said the male OB was present, but he just sat in the corner of the room “like a midwife” and said, “Breathe her out like a flower, Connie.” The hands that caught me as I slid out of my mother‘s body in a rush of ecstasy belonged to Myla Kabat-Zinn, the midwife my mother had hired to be with her at the hospital (who also happened to be the wife of the famed Buddhist meditation instructor and professor emeritus John Kabat-Zinn). My mother was a month shy of turning 43.
There are many things about the story of my birth that go against both the dogma of the Freebirth Society and the dogma of the medical establishment, which is why it feels so pertinent to share.
Freebirth Society dogma dictates that orgasmic birth – which many women regard as the pinnacle of birth experience, the “gold standard” if you will, that all other births are held up against – can only be achieved in the dark, undisturbed quiet of your own home, once you have evolved past the fears and inner trappings that keep you from such an experience, without any licensed professionals in attendance (or maybe even anyone, period, save your partner. And maybe not even him).
If someone other than your partner is in attendance, it should definitely never be a man under any circumstance, as that immediately classifies him as a sick and perverted individual who will, undoubtedly, rape you in some way (though my mother’s story proves this to be untrue, I personally do think women are better suited for the work of birth than men, for hopefully obvious reasons). And if it is a licensed midwife, she too will probably rape or abuse you. Better off alone. Or with someone who has taken the three-month (ok, ok – make it a year) FBS exclusive online training program (birth happens online, right? Look at Instagram!) whose name you can pay to find in our directory.
According to Freebirth Society dogma, not only is the hospital a dangerous place where you will most certainly be raped and abused, but homebirth midwives (or “medwives” as they are most often referred to) will also harm you. There is no safe place to give birth other than the solitary safety and sanctity of your own home, no safe person outside of the radical community. In FBS, just like in medicine, fear drives the narrative.
While never stated outright, there is a clear hierarchy of “best” ways to give birth within the community, with a wild pregnancy (which means no prenatal care or attention) resulting in an orgasmic freebirth at the top, and a hospital birth of any kind (including a medically necessary transfer) at the bottom. Are you a failure if you end up at the hospital? No one will say that outright. But clearly there was some part of you that either wanted to have that experience or wasn’t spiritually evolved enough to avoid it. And there will definitely be silent judgement and sometimes talking about you behind closed doors (or over private message threads).
Medical establishment dogma, on the other hand, doesn’t even recognize orgasmic birth as possible. When I was in induced labor with my first child in the hospital, when the nurse asked how my contractions were feeling and I said they “felt good,” she insisted that I must not be “progressing” fast enough (we were about 3 hrs into active labor at this point) and a procedure to break my waters and “get things moving” was encouraged. This nurse didn’t know I had my own birth story to lean into. She didn’t know that when I had sex while pregnant sometimes I would feel my entire, giant, baby-filled uterus contract pleasurably with orgasm. That I had been practicing and preparing to enjoy birth.
They did the procedure. It definitely didn’t feel good anymore after that.
Birth, in the medical world, is expected to be so painful that you need drugs to numb the pain. Drugs that cross the placental barrier into your infant’s precious new body and brain. Drugs that can have devastating, life-long consequences for both mom and baby. Drugs that conversely, in certain situations, may also give a woman exactly the break she needs to be able to relax and deliver her child vaginally (remember nuance?).
But back to my mom. By today’s standards, my mother would be classified as a “geriatric” mother (if there is a more derogatory medical term, I have yet to find it), deemed to be “high-risk” and someone who would be closely “monitored” – likely hooked up to an electronic fetal monitor, maybe even one where they would have screwed a metal implement into my unborn scalp (yes, they actually do this), a few IVs to make sure she’s adequately hydrated (and so they already have a port in, in case an unlikely surgery is needed), all of which would have tethered her to the bed unable to change positions, laying on her back in one of the worst positions for a woman to birth in (which very few women will choose if left to their own devices), which would have likely led to unbearable pain that would have, naturally, required drugs to mitigate. (If you read this and think “god, that sounds like torture” – it’s because it is).
In fact, due to her “high-risk” status, and the fact that I was 43 weeks gestation, she may not have even been “allowed” to go into labor naturally at all. If my mother walked into an OBGYN office in the same condition today, she would have undoubtedly been coerced into major abdominal surgery, again using fear tactics (you don’t want your baby to die, do you?) and I would have been delivered via cesarean a couple of weeks earlier than I intended to be born.
Orgasmic birth? Out of the question.
This is where we are at with obstetrics today in the US. For many women, it is abusive. Sometimes horrifically so. This abuse is precisely what women are afraid of, and why there can even be fear to drive the FBS narrative. No wonder our maternal mortality rate is the highest of any developed nation. No wonder so many women are looking for other options.
As for midwifery, in order to be licensed, most midwives have to completely divorce themselves from their intuitive instincts – the very instincts that make someone a good midwife. Instead of looking at what emerges in birth with as much objectivity and subtlety as possible, a midwife has to be charting, keeping detailed records of temperatures and blood pressure readings and fetal heart tones. Having to constantly track these kinds of things can remove her from being able to read the subtle energies in the space. Being able to read those energies and respond to what arises in the moment is exactly what midwifery is all about.
Because of licensure, the strict regulations around maintaining it, and the potential for irreparable legal consequences for the midwife if the birth ends in death, few midwives nowadays are acting solely in the best interest of the mother-baby dyad. Many are acting primarily in preservation of their license, career, and personal safety.
Death
The stories exposed in The Guardian article and podcast are heartbreaking. They are hard to hear. And there are more that didn’t make it in there. I was in the Lighthouse (Emilee’s private online membership) for a year, and during that time I saw a number of women, who didn’t appear in the podcast or article, sharing their stories – of either losing their own babies, or of women in their local freebirthing circles losing their babies. I think in the course of a year, in that group alone there were at least 4 or 5 baby losses that were mentioned.
The most difficult one for me to swallow was the woman who, after losing her baby, posted in the group that now Child Protective Services was after her for choosing freebirth, and she was at risk of both losing custody of her older child and going to jail. She said that no one ever talked about this as a potential risk, and that if she had known this could have been possible she would have made a different choice. And then she disappeared from the membership. I never found out what happened to her after that. But I think about her often.
Prior to the birth of my first daughter I had begun a midwifery apprenticeship, and had attended some births as a doula (though before joining RBK I had taken a break for several years). Of course I had heard of women having tragic losses. But they were rare. And until I joined RBK, I had only ever met one woman personally who had had a stillbirth. The rate at which I was seeing them in the community started to concern me. Were we missing something? It seemed like I was not the only woman starting to ask this question.
My year in the membership was coming to a close, and over that time it had become clear to me that I was not energetically aligned with Emilee and her company. I saw too much behavior from leadership that shocked me, that left an icky feeling in my gut and a bad taste in my mouth. I did not renew my membership, but I did stay in the “professional” group that was made up of RBK grads and current students, until I was suddenly removed – without any explanation or reason – a couple of months later.
It was a couple of weeks after I left the Lighthouse that I heard about the woman who had posted a video of her dying baby inside the membership, asking for advice. And then the Reddit thread exploded….
My guess was my removal from the “professional” and student group had to do either with the fact that I had identified myself in the one post I made in said Reddit thread (I was looking for someone in particular – someone who had been very close to Emilee who I had just heard had been kicked off her land), or because I was asking questions that they clearly couldn’t answer. Questions like “what is the FBS stance on molar pregnancy – when a woman has all the signs of pregnancy but is actually pregnant with a tumor which, if left undiscovered, can kill her?” Crickets.
If you listen to the Guardian podcast, it’s clear that there was some shady stuff going on. After what I witnessed both in the Lighthouse and as I got closer to Emilee’s inner circle, this was not entirely surprising to me. The psychology behind influence and ideology is subtle, complex and deeply important to understand in the context of all of this. We will dive more into that later.
But first I want to talk about death.
The issue of stillbirth is sad and tragic – and also deeply nuanced. According to data from Mass General Brigham, it is estimated that in the US 1 in 150 births are stillbirths, with the rate being even higher – 1 in 112 – in low income areas. That’s in the hospital – or at least, in births that were billed through insurance. In more than 30% of these deaths, there are no measurable risk factors involved.
In another study it states: “Stillbirth rates varied significantly with the proportion of low-income households (P < .001) and the proportion of Black vs White residents in a zip code (P < .001) (Figure 2) but not by rurality or levels of access to obstetric care.” (italics mine). The devastating truth is, sometimes – kind of a lot of times – babies just die. Does that warrant a call to Child Protective Services? Or jail time?
Who, ultimately, is responsible for death?
Of course, the most obvious answer to this question is contextual. Murder aside, this is a question that humanity has grappled with since the beginning of time. When someone who isn’t elderly and clearly at the end of life dies, our immediate reaction is to search for who is at fault for the death. We have a hard time accepting death as a part of life.
Death is excruciating and sad for the loved ones of the departed. I know this feeling intimately. We want answers. We want revenge. We want somewhere to go with our grief and our loss. The pain can be unbearable. It can also be a portal to divine connection. For many, it is both. This is ultimately a deeply spiritual issue. To pretend it is not, especially in regards to FBS, blinds us to important pieces of the larger picture unfolding.
The truth is, sometimes there are things that can be done to save a life. And if it’s at all possible to do those things, I personally believe (and I think most would agree with me) that it’s good to do them, especially if the chances of the person living a full and robust life after being revived are high. In fact, for most of us without injured instincts, it would be automatic to do what we can to save the life of someone who is in front of us and clearly needs help.
I have been in this situation a few times. There doesn’t tend to be a whole lot of thinking. The mind actually gets quite clear. If you have training you lean into that, and if you don’t, you listen to inner guidance and move – sometimes without even realizing what you are doing (where do you think the first life-saving protocols came from anyway?).
We all have been born with the innate capability to tap into a larger, unseen source of wisdom and receive clear information in moments of emergency (and otherwise). I do believe this. This is also one of the philosophies espoused in the RBK school – that if you stay connected to that Source, in a true emergency (which, they say, is exceedingly rare in birth and you will likely never see) you will just know what to do.
But I also know from my many years of holding space for women, often with some pretty traumatic histories, that there are many things that can hinder our ability to find that connection – especially in a high stress situation. And those things don’t generally exist in the mind, but are deeply buried in our flesh and sinew.
For most of us, the larger cultural influence and education we receive growing up guides us away from experiencing that connection. That connection is pathologized in mainstream culture and therefore not something that is consistently practiced. Most people are trained to outsource their agency and decision making to a figure of authority. This is built into the fabric of our education and society.
Whatever you have most consistently and recently practiced – be it a trauma response, deferring authority to someone else, connecting with a higher power, or emergency medical training – is what will likely take over in an emergency situation. In my experience, if your primary exercise is connecting with Source but you also have emergency medical training, you will draw on your training from a calmer and more resourced place, and may even be inspired to something that might not have been part of your training but is exactly what is needed in that particular situation.
I do think it’s good to have training on how to save a life, especially if you know you are more likely to be in situations (like birth) where a higher risk of death is possible. It can be difficult to find training that teaches you to effectively manage your fear in an emergency. I think a lot of the women who entered the RBK school mistakenly thought that kind of training – how to save a life without coming from a place of fear – is exactly what they were going to be receiving. Those are the skills of authentic midwifery. But you can’t teach what you don’t actually know.
Most of us are absolutely terrified of death. Or terrified that if we dotake action to save a life, that we will fail. Or if we don’t take action, someone will die. And then the death would be our fault. Wouldn’t it?
Who, ultimately, is responsible for death?
The generally accepted narrative goes like this: if you were in the hospital and someone dies, you did everything you could. The death was inevitable. It’s sad that the person died, but they were in the safest possible place and all life-saving tactics would have been utilized.
This line of thinking completely ignores the fact that, according to a 2016 John Hopkins study, in the US medical error accounts for over 250,000 deaths a year, making it the third leading cause of deathin our country. Believing that the hospital is the safest place is a display of cognitive dissonance at its finest.
But this is also why, when a baby dies in the hospital, no one hears about it. No one does an investigative report into what happened – was there something that someone might have done that could have negatively influenced the outcome? Was there some authority to whom the mother was outsourcing her decision making (like, maybe a doctor)? No one makes a Netflix documentary about it.
But if a baby dies at home? With a midwife? Or in a freebith? We mustfind the person to blame. If it’s with a midwife, the midwife – regardless of licensure – is usually the one to take the heat. If she’s unlicensed, heaven help her. Which is likely why we don’t see a bunch of women rushing into the profession.
But with freebirth….?
Politics
We have to recognize that the Freebirth Society really took off during the Covid pandemic. This was a time when anyone questioning the narrative coming from the major news outlets was penalized severely by their peers. Families were fractured – some of those fractures still rippling into today. People were pitted against each other in the ugliest fight without bloodshed that we’ve ever seen. And everything was happening online. This was the cultural context which encouraged the rise and the radicalization of the Freebirth Society.
What FBS, the RBK School and the private, vetted online Lighthouse Membership all offered was a safe place for women who thought differently than the mainstream narrative to come and have a voice. To connect with one another. To learn how to best serve women and babies. To affirm that no, we weren’t crazy for staying true to what our bones were whispering about womanhood.
Because everywhere else, we were being silenced – often with expletives and extreme hatred. There was no room for dialogue, no room for constructive criticism or critical thinking. Women – including myself – were afraid to speak what was true in our hearts. If you dared to believe that a woman is a human adult female and you wanted to create a penis-free space, suddenly you were “killing trans children.” If you didn’t want to wear a mask, you were responsible for the death of someone’s grandmother. Talk about dogma. Talk about ideology.
Emilee and Yolande offered a space protected by their fierce teeth, bared against the outside world. Inside, we were safe. At least, so it seemed. (Yo would say safety is an illusion – which I sort of agree with in theory, especially when it comes to “safety culture.” But I’ve also witnessed someone not wearing a helmet while riding a bike get clipped by a car and go flying, head inevitably hitting and spilling its contents onto the pavement. There was nothing illusory about the motionless body lying in a slowly growing pool of their own blood. So I’m not against certain safety precautions either. Within the enclave of FBS however, these are the kinds of lines that get pretty blurry, pretty fast).
It might not seem like it when you look out at the current landscape, but I think it deserves to be stated that bodies are not political. They have been politicized. But they are not, in essence, political. They are personal. Individual. Sovereign. Sacred. The only thing one can ever truly own.
A woman’s body is her body and does not deserve to be on any political ballot. A woman’s body is not something that should be legislated or regulated by someone else at all. Women should have complete choice over what happens to their bodies, whether they give birth or not, have sex or not, and where and with whom they do any of it.
As you may have guessed, I have generally tended to swing liberal. I was raised with liberal values, grew up in a liberal city, have tended to vote, and vote for liberal candidates. But what happened during the pandemic was shocking to me. It absolutely boggled my mind that the people I knew who would fight tooth and nail for a woman’s right to choose an abortion were the same ones maniacally shouting that the Covid vaccine should be mandatory for all people. These were the people now publicly shaming and shunning those who chose not to put experimental drugs into their or their children’s bodies. Not at all unlike the picketers outside the abortion clinics, telling women on their way inside and out that they are going to hell.
So much for choice.
While it might seem odd, I did not join the Radical Birthkeeper school with the idea that I would start attending births again. I joined the RBK school because I wanted to feel confident enough to speak out against what I was seeing as the insanity of the conversations (or really screaming matches) surrounding trans ideology. Bodies are not political. I wanted to learn how to be confident in the face of all of the maliciousness coming from the increasingly dogmatic “liberal“ left.
This was something that Emilee and Yolande had succeeded in doing. They had been viciously attacked in the media – even receiving death threats – but still managed to show up publicly and defiantly, and preach their strongly-held beliefs – seemingly unscathed and unflappable. I wanted to know their secret. They were selling courage and confidence – and in that political climate, I wanted both.
In some ways, I got what I paid for. Being around so many like-minded women did give me the courage to speak. There’s a whole section in my book detailing my thoughts around the trans movement. (There are also a few passages in my book that were colored by FBS dogma and fear of litigation for unintentional plagiarism, which I intend to revise in the second edition).
My children are clear on the biological differences between male and female. We aren’t mean about it – that’s important too. I don’t identify as a radical feminist, because I find the ideology to be kind of mean. I believe first and foremost in kindness. But I stand firm in what I know to be true about the sacredness of a woman’s biology, the fact that the female experience encompasses far more than performative femininity, the importance of respecting the bodies we are born into, and the influence of politics, money and social media on radical ideologies.
I don’t hate trans people. I just know as women, we still have work to do. And we need spaces where we can do that work without the influence of identity politics. I respect other people’s experiences and listen to their stories with an open mind and heart. One of my favorite poets in the world, Andrea Gibson, was trans. I don’t need what I believe to be true for anyone else. I just know what’s true for me, and I’m not afraid to say it anymore.
I’m currently in the creation stages of an annual women’s event for biological women who want to explore the sister wound and heal the toxic dynamics of power and leadership that we are seeing play out in many women’s spaces today. In more ways than one, this is in large part thanks to my experiences with FBS and the RBK school.
If we really want to point fingers, I think it’s important to acknowledge that it was this cultural landscape – ugly Covid vaccine debates and aggressive, disorienting trans ideology being pushed into schools – that helped bring the flourishing of the radical Freebirth Society into being.
It doesn’t take much to push someone over into being radicalized. A shitty angry comment or two here. A host of people who have seemingly lost their critical thinking ability there. Obvious harm done by those who are supposed to be helping and protecting – like people in the medical community. And then you find some people who are actually willing to listen to you, who might even share a few of the beliefs you hold. That’s really all that it takes. From there it’s just a gradual step – as long as the group is led by people with strong enough conviction – into more and more radical ways of thinking and viewing the world.
I remember at one point, shortly after completing the RBK, feeling like I couldn’t even talk to most people about birth anymore. My views had temporarily become so extreme they were isolating me from those around me, driving me back into the online community as the only place to find solace with others who “knew the truth about birth.”
I don’t think the solution to what’s being exposed about FBS is to legislate freebirth or crucify Emilee and Yolande. The solution is to be willing to have hard conversations with one another. To recognize and acknowledge the imperfections or contradictions in the things we embrace. To not immediately shut someone down who has a different perspective than you. To question your beliefs – and question the people you choose to follow. To invite nuance into the conversation. To examine what is buried in our sinews and tissues. To stop trying to make everything so fucking black and white, right and wrong.
Because the reality is, when we bite at people they either freeze, cower, or bite back. And when they bite back, they bite back hard. Yolande and Emilee are biters.
Protecting the Sacred
Birth is a sacred ceremony. The most sacred ceremony. And if there is one thing that I have learned in all of my years of ceremonial training, it is that you do not film ceremony – especially not for the internet. Personally, I do not believe that birth videos belong on Instagram or YouTube.
There are many people that would push back at me on this particular subject. Admittedly, there is a lot that can be learned from watching videos of other women’s births. Videos of home births have helped many women to know that homebirth is an option they can choose. And if a woman truly wants to use her birth as an educational tool for the world, that is her right to do so.
But that’s not what’s happening on Instagram. For the most part, the birth videos that show up on Instagram serve to feed a birthing hierarchy, an aesthetic to strive for -which is not what birth should ever be. Instagram birth videos have become yet another way for women to compare themselves to other women, using the most sacred right of passage that exists on earth for human females to do so. Yuck.
As I mentioned in my other article about influencer culture, we are not stopping to think about the far-reaching consequences of our actions when we do things like post a birth video online. The Freebirth Society made itself what it is by harvesting the sacred. Women all over the world freely shared the most intimate part of their biology and their life with the world – through images or videos on the FBS Instagram feed, and through stories on the podcast.
Why would women choose to do this?
I believe the answer lies in our deep-seated need to belong. In a world where folks will tear your head off for daring to be different, the Freebirth Society offered a “cool club” to be a part of that celebrated deviance from the mainstream. The buy-in was your birth. Either your story or your video or your pictures – or all three.
Without other women freely coming forward to share their stories – which is an innate thing that women need to do with one another – the Freebirth Society would not exist.
As far as I know, having been one of the women featured on the podcast, none of the women who shared their stories and built Emilee‘s empire for her were compensated for doing so. There was never any promise of compensation. It was just considered your good fortune to be featured on the feed or podcast. Lucky you. There was never any offer of gratitude or reciprocity. It was always “now what can I get you to pay me for, in perpetuity?” or “how can you serve what I’m building?”
In its essence, the premise of both freebirth and unlicensed midwifery is the decolonization of birth and the returning of it to its original, sacred design. You can’t do that and commodify it at the same time. It will never work that way. If birth truly belongs in the hands of women, it belongs there without a paywall. It belongs there through heart-led commitment, sacrifice, and years of showing up and humbly doing what needs to be done. Just like ceremony.
Leadership
It is ignorant and foolish to think that one can build a massive empire and following on social media and not be influencing other people’s choices and outlook on life. It’s in the fucking name influencer. It’s lovely to take the credit when that influence is positive. But what about when it’s not?
How we carry responsibility for the influence we have on other people matters tremendously. Especially when you consider what I mentioned earlier – about the fact that the culture at large trains us from an early age to outsource our authority to another person. Add influencer culture to that, and we have a whole other layer of mess – for women in particular. Anyone preaching 100% responsibility and taking a position of leadership – especially in women’s spaces – should probably be aware of that fact.
I find it interesting that it tends to be those who are most vocal about espousing the philosophy of taking 100% personal responsibility over our lives who, when the finger is pointed at them, turn it right around and shirk the responsibility of influence at every corner.
I’ve only known Em and Yo tangentially. I was a guest on the FBS podcast a few months after I freebirthed my second child in 2020 (after which Emilee invited me to move down to North Carolina, where she was “starting a village,” but that’s another story). I later interviewed Emilee on my podcast Sex, Love and Superpowers in 2021. As I’ve mentioned, I was a student of theirs, in 2023. Those classes were the first encounters I really had with Yo (I didn’t follow her on social media before that) and I totally fell in love. I attended the Matriarch Rising Festival (MRF) in 2023, where I met them both in person and bought Yolande’s book Portal. I was also a presenter at the MRF in 2024, where I launched the publication of my own book. Was I influenced by them? Yes. Yes I was. Luckily for me though, I held my center and didn’t get as entangled as I could have.
I think Margarit Davtian put it best in her article about her time in the Osho cult. She says, “Given our social conditioning around celebrity worship and influencer culture, is it any wonder that we trust authority figures who promise stability, belonging, clarity, and relief when we are most vulnerable?”
Pregnant and birthing women, while powerful as fuck, are also a very emotionally open and vulnerable population. I, when stumbling into the RBK, was also pretty vulnerable due to a variety of circumstances in my life at the time. Belonging, clarity and relief are exactly what FBS promised.
Davtian goes on to outline the biggest myths that people carry about power in spiritual spaces. My favorite?
“Myth #3: Abuse of power always looks like domination or coercive control
Reality: People underestimate spiritual abuse because they imagine it looks violent, forceful, or obvious. But power in spiritual settings rarely presents as force. It presents as someone who speaks with such conviction, insight, and authority that you slowly start deferring to their interpretation of your inner world.”
The bolding is mine. Because both Emilee, and especially Yolande, speak with insight, conviction and authority.
Davtian’s article is good. You should read it.
FBS is not a cult in the traditional sense. But in many ways, it is a spiritual community. Because, as I mentioned before, birth in its essence is a sacred ceremony. There are very clear, dogmatic beliefs that are espoused in FBS. Half of the RBK school is devoted to learning personal development “tools” which have very little to do with birth at all, as they deal primarily with the mind, and not the sinews and tissues where our obstructions to hearing inner wisdom are held. What the Guardian article very clearly exposes is that there were (and probably still are) many women deferring to Emilee and Yolande’s interpretation of their inner world.
What really stood out the most to me from The Guardian podcast series, is probably not what most people would think. It was something Nichole said in the first episode. It was when she was remembering that the origin of the word “con man” was “confidence man.” That one stuck.
Because what FBS sells, more than anything, is confidence.
But true confidence cannot be bought. Confidence that is bought and paid for is not confidence at all – it is arrogance and hubris. And nothing causes more harm than human arrogance and hubris. That is the root of the harm from the medical system, it is the root of the harm in midwifery, and it is the root of the harm of the Freebirth Society. Arrogance and hubris.
How can anyone claim to know the truth about birth? It’s like claiming to know the truth about God. It’s impossible. God, birth, and death are ineffable. They are unknowable, except in an unspeakable seed in the heart. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something (and the Freebirth Society is definitely selling you something).
There are no guarantees in birth. There are no guarantees in death. There is just a mystery, and the thing that we have lost sight of the most as a people is our ability to dance with mystery. Some things are just not knowable. Why can’t we just leave them alone? The mystery deserves a seat at the table just as much as the knowledge we’re trying to harvest around every single corner.
I have definitely been guilty of arrogance and hubris in my life. I am embarrassed to think about the arrogance I had about birth when I was under the influence of FBS. The one thing that I am focusing on in myself, more than anything these days, is the idea that “I know.” It’s what has gotten me in trouble more times than I can count. It’s hard because sometimes I do know. I know deeply in my heart and in my soul. But that knowing can only be for me. I can’t know for someone else (even when I do).
Another factor that cannot be overlooked in this conversation about leadership, is age.
The majority of women who are drawn to FBS are within a certain age range, because that is when women are fertile and having babies. Most of these women are in their 20s and early 30s. Now, I’m not saying that women in their 20s don’t have wisdom or discernment. But I also remember being in my 20s. I thought I knew everything. I was both naively innocent and arrogant as fuck. Birth humbled me to my knees. It brought me down a notch. It didn’t completely eradicate my arrogance, but it did make me pause for a while. Helped me untangle some of the harsh judgment that I had been passing on others before I gave birth to my own child.
When we look to leadership from women who are still in their birthing years, we are accepting leadership without elders. This can only ever lead to problems. I’m not going to pretend that every woman past menopause is wiser than every woman who hasn’t gone through that passage yet. I’m not going to pretend that there aren’t women who are 19 who haven’t delved into some amazing depths and harvested more wisdom than a woman who is in her 50s, 60s or beyond may have. I am not naïve enough to throw a blanket statement like that out.
But I do think that the concept of elderhood needs to be brought into this conversation. Because it matters and it matters a lot. As someone who has had the rare blessing to work with many traditional indigenous elders over the last 20 years, I can attest to the precious richness that they bring, and the spiritual poverty that exists in their absence. The exact same spiritual poverty that can have us grasping at the crumbs thrown to us by self-proclaimed leaders.
Sister Morningstar is the token elder for the Freebirth Society. I have met her. She’s a lovely woman. She struck me as someone who was truly coming from her heart and a desire to help women the world-over birth their babies in love, peace and consciousness. Incidentally, the year I presented at MRF was a year when Sister Morningstar was not able to attend. Emilee approached me, essentially saying that she thought of me as Sister’s energetic stand-in for the festival that year.
While I was flattered, it also struck me as odd. I am not an elder yet. I am merely a grandma-in-training – and a young one at that. But Emilee doesn’t care or understand about all that. For her, it’s about optics. The entire festival was a grand display for the coming year’s Instagram feed. I remember making it explicitly clear that the fire ceremony I was holding for the festival was not to be filmed, was not a performance – and Emilee agreed and acted like she understood. A few months later, a grainy video of that very ceremony, taken on someone’s phone, appeared on the MRF Instagram feed. So much for agreements. At MRF, cameras were capturing everything, even women in very intense emotional processes. Harvesting the sacred.
As far as I can tell with what I’ve experienced of Emilee, she doesn’t have many real relationships with people that exist outside of how useful that person is to her. Once she has either exhausted your usefulness, you get wise to her ways, or she realizes that she can’t use you in the way she thought she might be able to – she discards you. I’ve seen this over and over and over again.
Even though she is the token elder, Sister Morningstar is not the one who has been teaching the programs. And why is that? Why is the woman with the most amount of experience and knowledge not being lifted up and given a platform from which to share her expertise – and getting paid handsomely for doing so? That would’ve been a good thing to do. Maybe it’s because she didn’t want to teach midwifery skills online. Maybe there was a good reason for that….?
Those elders are humble – they give freely and don’t ask for much. And most of them are well-trained to not sell the sacred. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be taking care of them financially. That’s the job of those of us who are younger. We need to take care of our elders. Without them, we are lost.
Those gray hairs don’t count for nothing. It takes a lot of life lived to come by them. And if a woman has any level of consciousness or self-awareness at all, that life lived leads to wisdom. Unfortunately, the cultural invisibilization of women past a certain age has extended into the freebirth world. And that’s a really sad thing. To not have elders is dangerous. And I think what we are seeing unfold is proof of that.
I welcome my gray hairs and my wrinkles that are coming in. They are proof that I have lived through some things. That maybe, just maybe, I’m starting to have earned the right to teach.
I don’t need a bunch of fancy degrees to prove my knowledge and experience. I need soft folds and wrinkles and gray hair. I don’t find shame in them. And it saddens me that there are still women in positions of leadership and influence who are framing not having gray hairs or wrinkles as they age as some sort of merit badge. What the fuck ever. Aging is what happens to us if we’re lucky. I’m happy to start to show the signs of it.
But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I’m still just an elder-in-training. I’ve got a lot more living and studying to do.
In Closing
Someone asked me recently if I still agree with freebirth after all of this. My answer? Yes. I still think freebirth is the right option for some women. Freebirth has existed forever. But more importantly, I think that women having the right to choose how and where they birth matters the most.
I also think, if choosing to birth unassisted, it’s important to investigate why you want to. What is driving this choice for you? Really sit with that one. Is it because you saw or heard someone else’s story, and you want that too? Is it because some part of you wants the satisfaction of being able to say you did that? Is it because you have trust issues? Is it to fit in to some kind of club? Or is it a calling from deep within you? A knowing that this is truly the right path for you – one you have no problem sharing about with those you love?
If birthing unassisted, it’s wise to think about what you would do if there was an emergency, and also get some neonatal resuscitation skills. Karen Strange is my favorite for this, as she does an excellent job of teaching you how effectively manage your fear in a newborn respiratory emergency situation. Contrary to FBS dogma, getting this training does not mean that you will be calling in and “manifesting” an emergency at your birth. It just means that, if there is one, you will know how to handle it. It had been many years between my NNR training with Karen Strange and my own freebirth, but when my baby came out pale and limp, with a cord stretched tight and white – I knew what to do. And I’m really fucking glad I did.
If you find yourself getting to a place where you feel afraid or stuck enough to reach into an online group for help – you probably need help. In the real world. There is absolutely no shame in getting some. Women have been helping other women give birth since the beginning of time. 5 days is too long to be alone in labor. Getting help does not make you a failure.
After over 4 hours of bleeding out after my freebirth, passing placenta-sized blood clots but no placenta, I ended up momentarily losing my hearing. I knew that wasn’t a good thing. I knew I needed help. Did I fail to actually have a freebirth because of this? No fucking way. I know what I did. And I am grateful I knew when I needed help.
If the midwife who I had tried to have on standby for exactly this kind of reason hadn’t told me in our last visit that if anything went wrong to call the paramedics and not her – in a moment of absolute terror as she realized that I was actually going to go through with this and her plan to try to convince me otherwise hadn’t worked – I would have been able to stay home. I would never have gotten to that point.
I have been heartened by some of the conversations I’ve been witness to recently. I hope those of us in the birth world and beyond are learning something from this whole thing. Hopefully it does not become just another moment, lost to the next scandal as soon as it comes around. Hopefully we don’t lose sight of the very real work ahead of us.
For those who want to study the art of birth – find the ones with the wrinkles and the grey hair. They are likely not all over Instagram. They will be imperfect human beings, surely. But they also will have hopefully harvested some wisdom from the years that it took those grey hairs and wrinkles to grow. Learn from them, while they are still here. Lend them your strong backs and your ability to lose a night of sleep or two and not feel like a train wreck the next morning. Serve them. Listen to them. Learn from their mistakes. Push back against them if you need to. See how they respond.
You’ll probably be the one who cleans up the blood and the shit and the vomit, who takes the notes and does the laundry. It’s not a punishment – you will need to know how to do those things. Fall down and get back up again. Carve your own path in their wake. The rewards will be tremendous.
We need more women in the world of birth, not fewer. And we need more midwives who understand why women choose freebirth. We need less legislation around who can humbly serve a woman, not more. Standards and guidelines, sure. But not rigid licensing rules and punitive regulations that make instinctively serving a woman in her home nearly impossible. We need to gather with others drawn to birth – even, and maybe especially if, they think differently than we do. Those of us in leadership need to do better. We need to open the doors to conversation and heart-led dialogue. And we need to cultivate more awareness around the subtle power dynamics at play amongst women – especially around sex, money and leadership.
We’ve still got a lot of work to do. And the mothers and babies of the world need us to do it.