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 pr 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.