How The Internet Spawned A Baby-Killing Cult

Robert is joined by Caitlin Durante to discuss free birthers.

FOOTNOTES:

1. About Yolande
2. Rise of the 'free birthers': These women are choosing to give birth without medical help — and at least one baby has died
3. Home birth advocate’s baby dies during free birth, prompts questions
4. An Infant’s Death Has Sparked A Heated Debate Around The "Free Birth" Movement
5. She Wanted a ‘Freebirth’ at Home. When the Baby Died, the Attacks Began
6. Why American infant mortality rates are so high
7. Home births 'as safe as hospital'
8. Woman: Doctor Told Me to “Shut Up and Push”
9. What Is "Birth Rape"?
10. Birthrape. Birthrape. Birthrape. Birthrape. Birthrape.
11. The hallmark of women who choose freebirth: emotional immaturity
12. Home deliveries
13. Emilee Saldaya is as ethically responsible for baby Journey Moon’s death as if she had taken out a gun and shot her
14. Radical Birth Keeper Consultation
15. Rise in ‘freebirthing’ suggests women feel midwives and doctors are ignoring their needs
16. Why do some women choose to freebirth? A meta-thematic synthesis, part one
17. Free Birth Society Instagram

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, America. This is Robert Evans. I am sitting in
a car on top of a mountain like a professional
person recording my podcast, which is this podcast Behind the Bastards,
and we've had yet another, I mean, really bad introduction. Actually,
I'm I'm I feel bad about this one. I actually
like that one. Oh you like that one, Sophie. That's yeah.

(00:23):
Well do you think that only people in America in
the US listen to Solid Points. If there's non Americans
listening to this podcast, what the hell are they doing?
Like this is they don't get our freedom, our freedom
of speech, that's ours and ours alone, Caitlin. The best
thing about freedom of speech is limiting it to a

(00:45):
small number of people. Yes, I don't agree, but I
see your point. Yeah, I firmly disagree with what just happened,
and I take back my praise of your introduction. Hello,
international listeners, we love you. Yeah. I bet they're from
all over the world. Yes, Canada, yes, Japan. Yes, Canada

(01:08):
is just Alaska's Mexico. Mexico and Canada are both much
better countries. Um, almost spit my soup on the mic.
Oh my god, it was a bad time to try
to eat soup. Sorry, I took a week in rural

(01:28):
America to to clear my head and get some writing done,
and it has made me insult our neighbors to the
north and south for no reason. You did that before?
Come on, I did, I did? I did. I love
insulting nations for no reason. Well, my guest today, as
as you just heard from, is Caitlin Duranti. Caitlin, how
are you doing today? I'm doing very well. I'm delighted

(01:50):
to be here now, Caitlin. You're the co host of
the Bechtel cast Um and you you have guessed it
on behind the bastards before. We had a long talk
about I think a man both of us consider a
dear friend now, Lafayette Ron Hubbard. Yes, yes, he just
he's coming to my birthday party soon. Oh good. You

(02:10):
know I think he's at all of our birthday parties,
convincing our small children to deliver letters for him on
his boat crusade to find gold in the ocean. Yes, god,
I miss him. Well, we're not talking about that today, Caitlin,
And we're talking about the goat Testical doctor either, right, No,

(02:30):
we're not talking about the goat Testical got about her,
that fucker that guy. Yeah, like Alex Jones, but with
goat testicles. No, today we're talking about the free birthing community. Caitlin,
have you ever heard of the free birthing community. I
don't know that I have, Robert. Oh boy, Caitlin. Yes,

(02:55):
you're you're gonna, You're gonna enjoy this. I mean, so,
I I got where to start. I I wrote a
little introduction here, and I don't think I'm gonna read it.
I think we're just gonna we're just gonna dig into it. Um. Yeah,
the nexus of my introduction was that back in the day,

(03:16):
you know, there's this one website that's kind of like
the Tower of Babbel for the Internet, that Something Awful Forums.
It's where four Chain came out of. It's where like
doxing was very first practiced. It's where a lot of
like meme culture originated from. UM and that those forums
had a motto, and that motto was the Internet makes
you stupid. And it was just at the time, because

(03:37):
it's like the late nineties, early two thousand's is when
like Something Awful was really at its most relevant. Yeah,
so it was, and it was and you were you
remember then Caitlin, when the Internet didn't really matter, when
like it was just sort of the silly thing, and
people like mainstream TV or news kind of made fun
of people who were on the Internet a lot, like

(03:58):
it wasn't taken very seriously, and so I think that's
what the motto kind of meant then, was just like
the Internet's dumb. But as the years have gone by
and the Internet has eaten the world, I've come to
believe in those words very literally. The Internet does actually
make people stupid um and I think to the free

(04:19):
birth in community in particular is a perfect example of
how this works, because, thanks to the wonders of the
modern Internet and most particularly Facebook, a bunch of otherwise
well meaning, functional human beings have left a trail of
dead babies in their wake, not because they wanted to
kill babies, but because the Internet broke their brains. And
that's the story we're going to tell today. Wow, okay,

(04:42):
sided this is a dead baby episode. Oh my okay,
wait okay. Initial question, preliminary question, do you know anything?
I don't know anything about the free birthing community, but
I have a feeling that there's got to be some
overlap between it, and just based on what I think
it is, based on the name alone, overlap between that

(05:06):
community and the anti vaxers. You absolutely, oh yeah, okay
for god, oh my god. Um yeah, it's uh, it's
pretty cool, Caitlin, and I want to welcome you, by
the way, into a really rarefied circle of of Bastard's

(05:27):
pod guests. Uh. Currently, Sophia Alexandria Billy Wayne Davis are
the only two members of the Dead Babies Episodes sub club,
So very can we get a couple of aircorns in
there for for the third member of our Dead Baby Triumvirate? Yes,
I just added so much. Are you wandered, Caitlin? I'm

(05:49):
so honored? And what what a group to be a
part of. I mean, the I and Sophia, I mean,
what what terrific people, so rarefied air verified air now, Caitlin. Uh,
if you, if you, or at least sorry not even you, Caitlin.
If you the listener at home have heard about the
free birthing community recently, it's probably because of a fabulous

(06:11):
NBC News article by Brandy's a Drowsney that dropped a
couple of days ago, and the article's title was I
brainwashed myself with the internet. Uh. It is the story
of a twenty eight year old woman on the West Coast,
pseudonymed Judith, who found yourself slowly drawn into a series
of online communities of women who believe that the best
way to give birth is with no medicine, no doctor,

(06:31):
and no midwife. So, you know, we're all aware that
there's like home birthing um sort of like communities and stuff.
These are people who are like that, but they're like,
but midwives are evil too. Oh wow, I don't want
anyone who knows that goddamn thing about medicine around for
my birth. Like that's the gist of these people, A right, yeah, yeah,

(06:54):
So that's a fun thing that I hadn't realized existed
until I read this article. And the t l d
R of the story is that Judith left her baby
in her belly for way too long, more than forty
two weeks, because these people believe, among other things, that
having your labor induced, you know, medically is um is
on an awful thing to do and an unnecessary thing

(07:16):
to do. So she was pregnant almost three weeks past
the nine month mark and refused to go to the
hospital and her baby died inside of her um. Yeah,
this is the first time we've had a first dead
baby on page one. We're not even halfway through page one. Yeah,
I bring that out in people, you know, the dead,

(07:37):
the dead babies. I don't know what I meant by that. Yeah,
I got wet. I just my presence encourages people to
talk about dead babies, as I think what I meant, Well,
that's good. Well we'll be talking about a number of
them today. So obviously, Judith's story was a traumatic, painful nightmare. UM.

(07:57):
And she's far from the only person that this kind
of nightmares happened to as a result of the free
birth in community. Uh. The NBC article itself links to
a November two, eighteen Daily Beast article by Emily Sugarman.
The article's title is she wanted a free birth at home,
when the baby died, the attacks began, and it's it's
the story of a woman named Lisa and her would
be daughter, Journey Moon. Uh. Lisa got drawn into the

(08:20):
free birth in community via like Facebook groups and podcasts,
and her baby died. Uh. And then she was harassed
by a bunch of people online who are angry that
she'd killed her baby who had been infiltrating these free
birth and communities. It's a mess of a story, and
the tales of these two women comprise about of the
public discourse around free birthing at the moment. It's kind

(08:40):
of very recently burst onto the scene. But there's so
much more here under the surface, uh, than is even
in both of these very well written articles, And today
I I felt like what I could do to add
to this is dig a little bit deeper into where
the free birth in community comes from and the individual
I'm gonna call himbastards who were aspond posible for starting

(09:01):
what is effectively a weird cult dedicated to getting people
to basically kill their babies by not having anyone who
knows anything about medicine around when they come out of people.
Cool fun story. Can't wait? You sound really motivated by
this to be a part of this fun tale. I

(09:21):
so am you. You have no idea, just I I
have no ability to like emote with my voice, but um,
I am very excited to learn about. Call that v moting. Okay, Yeah, Now,
free birthing obviously has its origins and the natural home
birth movement, and the term home birth started being used

(09:41):
in the mid eighteen hundreds as hospital births became more common.
At present, most so called developed nations, you know, that's
the term generally used. I don't like it, but it's
kind of hard to find. Counter terms sometimes have home
birthing rates of less than one percent um. It's broadly
accurate to say that the end of home birth thing
as a normal thing, you know, the end of that

(10:02):
being the way most babies were born has corresponded with
a massive reduction in the rate of both infant and
mother deaths in childbirth. So we stopped giving birth at home,
started giving birth in hospitals with doctors and a lot
less babies and moms die, right, pretty obvious. But here's
where it gets weird, because the situation isn't quite that simple.

(10:22):
The United States today has one of the highest infant
mortality rates in the Western world. Six of our infants
die for every thousand live births, which puts the US
on par with such healthcare powerhouses as Serbia and Malaysia.
Despite regular advances in technology, matters, matters are actually getting
a lot worse for American mothers at a startlingly rapid rate.

(10:42):
A pregnant woman in the US today is fifty more
likely to die in childbirth than her mother was. Yeah, like,
that's an enormous jump in mama and baby deaths. We
woul account for that? What accounts for that? Well, there's
there's a number of intersecting factors here. One of the
ones given regularly is eroding social support for women. Um

(11:04):
So as a result of this like crusade against birth
control and planned parenthood by the right in our country,
women's access to obstetric services in rural U S counties
has collapsed. UH. Nine percent of all rural American women
lost hospital obstetric services between two thousand and two thousand fourteen. UH.
The shocking expensive birth plays a major role in this.

(11:25):
Two people who just can't afford to to do it
in a hospital. So between the cost and the sheer
lack of access, the fact that growing communities of American
women have been turning to home birth is not weird
um and it's not necessarily harmful either. The Netherlands actually
has a really high rate of home births. In two
thousand nine, the largest study of its kind was conducted there,

(11:45):
analyzing more than five thousand births and finding no difference
in the birth or death rates of home births versus
hospital births. And you'll hear the studies cited a lot
by home birthing advocates, and they all tend to leave
out something critical, which is that the home birthing there's
in this Netherlands study, we're all women who were determined
by a doctor beforehand to have low risk pregnancies. So

(12:08):
if you have a competent midwife and if a doctor
is consulted first to make sure you're a low risk pregnancy,
home birthing can be perfectly safe. That's the one thing
I want to get out of the way first. But
our free birthing friends who are going to be talking
about today, they don't use midwives and they for sure
as ship don't consult doctors um. And most of the

(12:28):
Facebook groups with these people gather explicitly list advising another
person to seek medical attention as a bannable offense. So
they'll say, like, if you advise anyone to go to
a doctor to induce pregnancy to like talk to an O, B. G.
Y in or whatever, um like, we'll kick you out
of the group because this is not about that. Okay,

(12:49):
so they these are the people I feel like, these
are the people who, like if they were uh, you know,
convicted of a time, or they had to go to
court or something, they'd be like, I'm going to represent myself,
Like I don't need a lawyer, I'm on my own. Wow. Yeah,

(13:10):
there's that phrase, like a person who defends themselves in
court has a fool for a lawyer. I guess a
person who delivers their own baby as a fool for obstetrician. Yes. Yeah,
So the first Facebook page that comes up now when
you google free birth Facebook group currently hosts an image
meme that says we are all descendants of someone who

(13:33):
birthed at home without a licensed midwife. Um, and that
is true, But you could just as easily say we're
all descendants of someone who died at home giving birth
without any sort of medical assistance, because that's equally true. Right. Yeah,
we all have a gramma here who got through a
couple of babies and then couldn't make it past fifth

(13:53):
or sixth or whatever. Right, Yeah, this is gonna be
a fun one. That just made me think, like, who, like,
did I have like a great great great great grandmother
who like died during childbirth, but like their baby survived,
and like I'm the descendant of Yeah, that's got to
be true for us. Of us, there's no one who's

(14:17):
somewhere in their family line doesn't have multiple people who
died during childbirth. Like that's that's just a guarantee, just
because of the way the world biology and ship worked
and works. So when we're when we're trying to unravel
the mystery of how this deadly freebirth and community came to,
because I wanted to kind of trace it back to
its origins. And my first question when I started doing

(14:38):
that was when did this whole movement split off from
just the home birthing movement? And as best as I
can tell, a lot of it traces back to the
story of one woman named Catherine's Skull now MS. Skull
was a former Chicago police officer, and she was pregnant
with her fifth child um back in two thousand eight.
She was admitted to Rush University Medical Center and received

(15:00):
an unpleasant surprise. Her normal obstetrician was out of town
on vacation, so instead of the doctor she was comfortable with,
she was attended to by a stranger and a stranger
who happened to be a really big asshole according to MS. Yeah, yeah,
he sucks. This guy's Dr Scott Pierce is his name,
and he apparently started their interaction by yelling at her
for not coming in earlier and not calling before coming in.

(15:23):
He informed her that because she had not given them
enough warning, there was no time for him to give
her pain medication. Then he told her that she deserved
to be in pain for not giving the hospital more
lead time, saying sometimes pain is the best teacher. Well,
it's like, not not a great doctor. Um. He next
gave her an extremely rough vaginal exam that, like she

(15:46):
described as unnecessarily rough and painful while she was in
mid contraction um, and then he ordered her to begin
pushing before she was fully dilated. He told her repeatedly
that her baby might die, and had a loud phone
conversation in the next room about abortion, telling another one
of his patients that stupid woman, she has no business

(16:06):
being pregnant. So pretty bad story. Yeah, yeah, not how
you want a pregnancy to go. Um. And Catherine Scholl
is not the bastard here. She filed a civil suit
against Dr Pierce. Uh. He was eventually fined five hundred
dollars and sentenced to one year of medical probation, which
seems like a reasonably fair punishment for his crime. Yeah,

(16:28):
I would well find only five and I think the
fine could have been higher. The fine should have been higher.
But like, yeah, he was definitely like when a medical
board looked into it, they found out that like, yeah,
this guy's behavior was completely unacceptable and the story of
so like Catherine School did nothing wrong. Um, she was
abused by a doctor, she filed a suit against him,

(16:51):
and he was punished. You know, we could argue the
punishment should have been more, but her part of the story,
she acted perfectly reasonably. But the story of Catherine's School
took off like wild fire among the networks of mommy
blogs dedicated to the natural birthing movement UM, and without
knowing it, school became a rallying point for other women
who had bad experiences with their doctors during childbirth. School

(17:12):
story helped to galvanize a community of birthing extremists who
had started organizing online, and one of the very first
and perhaps the founder of the free birthing movement was
an Australian woman named Jeannette Frasier. Jeanette founded the website
Joyous Birth in two thousand seven. In December of that year,
she coined the term birth rape in a blog entry

(17:33):
to refer to what she thought people like Dr Pierce
were doing to their patients. Birth rape. Yeah. Um so
here's here's kind of her explaining what that means. I
don't care if you don't like the word or the idea.
It's real, So get used to it. Survivors are angry
and we're starting to talk about it. Remember that old
anti violent slogan, Well, it means even in hospitals and

(17:56):
even in stupid hospital gowns, when I say no, it
means no. When you shove your arm and a woman
who's screaming no, that's rape. When you rupture those membranes
because you have to tick the box that comply with protocol,
even when the woman screams no, that's rape. When you
slash a woman's vagina with scissors and she's screaming no,
that's rape. And on the streets that would earn you
a jail sentence. Your green gown is not protection. Do
that to me and I will charge you. Don't forget it.

(18:18):
We are angry, and we are powerful. We have survived
your raping protocols, so we can survive anything. Be afraid,
and don't underestimate us. And I'm curious kind of for
your thoughts on that. I'll tell you sort of where
eye land on this, which is that I'm sure there
are a lot of things that happen to women who
are giving birth that they may say no about. Because
once you're giving birth to a baby, the doctor is

(18:41):
going to like legally has to do whatever he can
or she can do to make sure that baby comes
out alive. And you might not in the moment want that,
but you're in a hospital and that's kind of the
way hospitals go. And I'm I'm personally like, obviously I'm
very pro choice, but at the point in which that
baby is coming out, like the doctor is equally beholden

(19:02):
to the baby and to the mother. Um, that's kind
of how I think, Yeah, I'm interested in Yeah, I
mean the child. Like that's that does like complicate matters because, um,
you know, on one hand, you have you know, I
kind of see what she's saying, um in this in

(19:23):
this definition of this term um of you know, doctors
like you know, doing things that could be considered rape
or assault. Um. And like you know, the women are
you know, the people who are giving birth not giving consent,
but you know the doctor is doing something that they

(19:44):
deem medically necessary for you know, the safety of the
baby perhaps. So that is a very complicated thing. UM. Okay,
so I okay, well let's let's do this. Uh. I
don't know if if you know this, Robert or um,

(20:04):
if any listeners are aware of a podcast that I've
been working on called Sludge An American health Care Story
so um, and this is all about a recent experience
I had with the um American health care system. Spoiler
shit it's it was ship. So I. And I'm not

(20:25):
saying that every you know, healthcare experience of every person
in the US is shitty. It's not if you have
a million dollars or more so. But you know, I
this is all to say that I have hearing people's
stories because I've started to interview other people with their
sort of medical nightmare stories, and I'm learning all these
different things about how certain like medical protocol is not

(20:51):
very good. Um. One specific example I will site is
the way that the medical community treats like intersects baby
these um, which is horrible, and they perform procedures and
surgeries that the babies can't consent to um and that

(21:12):
the parents often don't know enough about the situation, you know,
just all these things. So on one hand, like, yes, uh,
they're like having people who know about childbirth and who
know about um protocol for medical protocol for childbirth should
be present um at a childbirth. But there's also certain

(21:37):
things that medical professionals sometimes do that are perhaps violating patients. Yeah,
I have very complicated feelings about it. Is really complicated.
I don't like calling it rape because I don't know.
Rape is a very specific thing. And I understand how

(22:01):
some of the trauma you know of of undergoing being
forced to undergo a medical procedure you don't uh want
to undergo UM or don't you know are are are
kind of not present enough mentally to like understand what's
happening to you because you're in this like really altered state. Uh,
Like I understand how that would be traumatic, UM, but

(22:22):
I I feel weird about saying that. Like if a
doctor does something you don't want because he's trying to
save your baby's life, um, that that's the same as rape.
That that's weird to me. I do, but like there's
a bunch of ship obviously that like yeah, doctors do
without the consent of the baby, like with intersex babies.
And also like you can make an argument about circumcision
where it's like that's not a medically necessary thing you're

(22:44):
doing and the child should maybe have some say and
what happens to its own body. Um So like yeah,
like this is like this whole issue. Like there, I
I want to kind of highlight that, like, while this
community we're talking about I think is fundamentally toxic, there
are some reasonable questions that like start that we're being
asked at the start of this, and I think this woman,

(23:06):
Jeanette Fraser, is going too far and kind of yeah,
we'll talk about her more in a bit, but I
don't think like there she's entirely and these other people
are entirely coming out of an unreasonable place. The health
care system and the child birthing system in this country
is fucked. And like the fact that women today are
likely to die in childbirth is as much evidence as
you need to know about that. Um, I wonder it's

(23:29):
really messy. I wonder if she just came up with
that term birth rape because it sounds sort of like
birth rate. And she's like, won't this be a catchy
phrase or something I don't like? Um, I think you
know what? That might be the case. We'll we'll see
if you how you think about that? When we finished
talking about Jeanette Fraser. But Robert, do you want to

(23:49):
know what else is a really catchy phrase? Oh? I
was gonna say, do you want to know what? Won't
perform medical procedures on your child? Gina tell you without
their consent? Oh, I think that's our our our our
sponsors who offer that. That is the only guarantee we

(24:10):
make about our sponsors, Mike Bloomberg and the Raytheon Corporation.
They will not order surgery on your children. I can't
vouch for Mike Bloomberg on that. No, he will. He
will absolutely order. Yeah. No, why we shouldn't have en
Raytheon will as well. Um, so enjoy these words from
our sponsors, who may, in fact order your children to

(24:32):
undergo medical procedures that are not strictly necessary. Adds We're back. Okay,
So we're talking about this woman Jeanette Fraser who coins
the term birth rape um, and she has this website
Joyous Birth and Joyous Birth advocated for legal reform around pregnancy,

(24:57):
and the core ideology on display there is the same
core ideology that we saw creep up later in the
free birth in community UM, and the basic idea is
that women should be the absolute arbiters of what happens
during their pregnancy, which, like, there's aspects of that that
sound reasonable, but like, obviously I do think there is
a certain point where we're like, no, you you've got
too human beings here now, and like you don't get

(25:20):
to make every I don't know. I have a lot
of issues in general with the amount of control parents
have over what happens to their kids bodies. That worries me. Yeah, um,
so yeah, this is a really messy and complicated thing, um.
But Joyous Birth it was very clearly from the beginning
focused around the desire to like not have any medical

(25:43):
procedures performed on your children, to do it all naturally
or holistically, with like whatever remedies you could whip up
in your kitchen. It had a forum with a few
dozen members, and that forum had threads with titles like
strep question mark, question mark? Can this be treated without antibiotics?
Another ear infection? Dot? Dot dot? What can I do

(26:05):
to avoid the antibiotics? So not only so once they're
children have been birth, assuming they survive, there's there against
all medical Yeah that's really the kid's life. Okay, Yeah,
there's a lot of talk about how can I avoid

(26:26):
antibiotics for my children with bacterial infections? Uh. One of
the threads from Mummy Juice just says blood and pooh
question mark, which I'm sure it does not end with
a happy story. So uh, not a great community. We
can agree there's some problems with the way uh childbirthing

(26:50):
is handled by the medical establishment. But like, yeah, if
you're typing out, my kid keeps getting ear infections, why
how can I deal with this without treating it with medicine? Like, baby,
you're doing a bad job. I don't know. Just give
that kid some some goat testicles, secure all as we learned,

(27:10):
or audit the child, give me lead out you know. Yeah,
so I it's it's it's pretty cool. Um. Now, I'm
not exactly sure when all these women started using the
term free birth to describe what they were advocating, but
by March of two thousand nine that change had happened.
Um And the first time I run across the word

(27:31):
free birthing to refer this community is when Jeanette Fraser
was interviewed by a website called The Age. Uh and
I'm gonna quote from that interview. This is right before
she was supposed to give birth to her fifth child.
Janette Frasier is in labor. Her plan is to drop
the baby on the lounge room floor or wherever feels
good at the time. Has she called the hospital to

(27:51):
let them know what's happening. When you go on a
skiing trip, do you call the hospital to say, I'm
coming down the mountain? Can you set aside a spot
for me in the emergency room? I don't think so,
says Fraser, who's breathing sounds strained. Amazing logic. Yeah, I mean,
they generally do have medical professionals at ski lodges and

(28:12):
stuff because of the dangers of skiing. But yeah, this
is pretty much where we're in the conversation that started
with me calling Frasier and asking if it was true
that her organization, Joyous Birth, was advocating that women go
it alone, giving birth at home with no midwife or
general practitioner or bags of resuscitation gadgets. Free birthing. Plenty
of women do it, she says. In fact, Fraser is

(28:33):
doing it right now. I prefer to be an autonomous
care provider, she says, So that's kind of the terminology
used here. Yeah, I mean, okay, so I'm obviously all
for like giving women agency over their bodies, right, Like
that's important and it absolutely so it feels like this

(28:56):
community they like started with that, but then have taken
it far too far to the I mean, and I'm
sure you're going to get into this soon, but like
all I mean if we prefaced it the dead babies, Um, yeah,
so like obviously the results aren't often good, it seems

(29:21):
with this, uh, with free birthing, but like, oh, it's
just it's so annoying that they're like doing this under
the guys of like, yes, women's autonomy and agency and
look how important it is, because that is important, but
then they've like bastardized it into this like disgusting killing
baby enterprise. Like yeah, it's and it's it is frustrating

(29:45):
to me that they're kind of co opting a lot
of the language of the pro choice movement because it
was like, when that baby is, you know, a clump
of cells, when it's it's not capable of living independently
in any way, shape or form. I I think it
would be horrible to give anyone but the mother control
over her own body. But the point of that thing's
been in there nine months and it's coming out and
it can survive on its own, Like this is no

(30:05):
longer just you here. There's an independent, living human being
that also has rights. Um. Yeah, And it is kind
of messy drawing that line, but certainly at the point
at which your forty one weeks pregnant, um, I think, Yeah,
I don't know, especially just because like there, I mean,

(30:27):
I don't know anything about childbirth. Uh, nor will I
because I don't intend to have children ever. But like
there are so many people who do intend to have children.
Who's still like, there's there's only unless you're trained as
a midwife or a medical professional. It seems like a
really dangerous thing to go at it. Yeah, And it's

(30:50):
like these are people who are kind of like refusing
for there to be any kind of like reasonable middle
path here because you know, the evidence does show that, like,
if you're checked out by a doctor war hand and
you have a midwife, home birthing can be a totally
safe process. But they're like, no, funk that midwife thing
and fuck checking with a doctor. That's all a violation
of my rights. Um, which is dumb. I think. I

(31:13):
think it's a dumb way to do things. It's not good. Yeah,
So Jeanette is probably the clearest case for the founder
of the free birthing movement and her baby, who she
was pregnant with when that article was written. Roisen was
born five days after the article dropped. Janette delivered him
without assistance in her home, and Roisen was born alive

(31:34):
but not breathing. His heart was not beating properly. He
was not stillborn, but he did come out in immediate
need of expert resuscitation, and unfortunately no expert was available.
And all Janets are Nica creams and herbal childbirthing remedies
were useless in the face of this cold reality. Yeah,
I'm gonna quote from the coroner's report about her her

(31:55):
dead baby. Quote. Essentially, miss Fraser was quite unprepared for
what happened. There was not even a hard flat surface
available on which Royson could be placed for resuscitation. So
these three amateurs, Miss Fraser, Mr. Stokes and Miss Deuce
first placed the child on the rim of the inflatable pool,
and when that proved unsatisfactory, used a chair. They were
unable to abandon the chair and place Royson on the

(32:18):
floor in order to effectively administer CPR, because the placenta
not having been delivered, that was as far as she
would reach. Evidently, it appeared to nobody present to clamp
and cut the cord, and anyway, Miss Deuce told the
inquest she had not been aware of the ready availability
of any equipment to enable her to do so. According
to Missduce, further difficulties were encountered in administering CPR because

(32:40):
Royson was slippery and difficult to hold, and evidently it
did not occur to anybody to wrap her in a towel,
though there were towels nearby. Yeah, yeah, it's sucked up. Wow.
So yeah, and it came like this, I mean, this
is like straight up negligence right where like that I

(33:02):
would I would say, so the baby died and the
mom was responsible, Like is she a murderer. Now like
does she face No, she legally know and in most
parts of the world she will not legally face consequences
for this. Um. You know, it's kind of thing we're
only just now within a pretty recent period of time
where like parents would get start to get in trouble

(33:23):
in some places for like refusing to give their kids
necessary blood transfusions because of a religious belief, Like you
can still get away with that actually in a number
of places. Um, So this is this is not a
thing where like the women who do this are generally
prosecuted at all. Um. Although, yeah, I would agree with you,
this seems like negligence of maybe a criminal nature. Yeah,

(33:44):
it's like manslaughter. Maybe I don't like some baby slaughter.
Baby it's a horrible phrase. So that's Jeanette Fraser, one
of the founders of the Free Birthing movement, and the
other woman usually given as a founder for the free
birthing movement is Laura Shanley. She was interviewed in December
of two thousand eight, the same month Catherine's Skull filed

(34:05):
charges against her doctor, uh and she was interviewed for
an ABC News article titled Mothers to Be saying no
to modern medicine. Now, that article does not use the
term free birthing, which is part of why I think
Jeanette Fraser probably gets the credit for that, but it
does mention a dead baby, Laura Shanley's dead baby. To
be precise, Shanley had successfully delivered her first four children

(34:26):
at home. She delivered the fifth two, but he had
a rare heart deformity and he died. Shanley claims that
said nothing at all to do with the fact that
she chose to give birth without any expert medical care present. Quote.
If you have a baby that's born at home, and
especially in an unassisted birth, regardless of the fact that
the coroner said this baby would not have survived, you know,
there are still people that will blame me for my
baby's death, Shanley said, And that's just something I have

(34:48):
to accept now. I'm not competent to diagnose whether Shanley's
child would have died if he'd been born in a hospital.
But someone who is competent is Dr Amy Tutor, an
obstite Ristian gynecologist who runs a blog called The Skeptical
oh B and focus is mainly on busting misinformation about pregnancy.
She has a special hatred for free birthing and notes

(35:10):
of Miss Shanley's pregnancy she made no attempt to stop
the premature birth of a son and watched him die
in the bathtub. So yeah, two founders of the movement
to dead babies. That's where we're starting here. Okay, cool stuff, huh,
really really cool stuff. Caitlin is looking at me like, Sophie,
why did you bring me here? How you feeling, Kitlin? Um?

(35:35):
You know, I am really just frustrated by the willful
negligence of this this movement. I'll buy your supe plantation
next time we get dinner. Thank you so much? Are
we are five pages in Caitlin, and we have four
dead babies, so we are almost one dead baby per
page to this. Wow? Yeah, what cool? What a rate?

(36:00):
What a rate? So Shanley and Fraser were the two earliest,
loudest voices and the splinter of the home birthing movement
that turned into free birthing. Uh. They both lad large
online communities that increasingly pushed their members away from trusting
actual medical professionals for anything. Dr Tutur blames them for
a lot of this, and she considers their activism to
be the result of extreme emotional immaturity, and she wrote

(36:23):
on her blog quote free Birthers are monstrously egotistical, reflexively
defiant of authority, unwilling to admit mistakes and capable of
accepting responsibility for their own actions, and entirely devoid of
any empathy for their suffering babies. Yeah, says sums up
for me that I wonder if they're all just like narcissy, like, yeah,

(36:46):
narcissis yeah, Like, um, I don't need a doctor. I'm
a genius and I can handle this on my own.
I don't think all of the women who get sucked
into it are I think most of them are probably
pretty normal people who are kind of maybe more inclined
to like sort of hippie dippy stuff and liked like
off the grid, a lot of like off the grids,
sort of like you know, back to nature, almost survivalist
kind of women get really into this because they're attracted

(37:08):
to the idea of self sufficiency. But I do think
the people at the head of this movement, the women
who are sort of like driving it, I think there
is a lot of narcissism, um and you can see
that in the things that they say. Um uh. For example,
in the wake of her baby's death, Janet Frasier made
this defiant statement, my birth rape with my first child

(37:31):
is traumatic. My still birth was not. Mm hmm yeah.
Um that just sounds like a lie to justify what
she's doing. And also like, regardless of what happened with
your first child, that baby is alive, it gets yeah,

(37:53):
your other baby is not, and yeah, note the difference,
like yeah, yeah, yeah. So another story that a doctor
to tour sites of like kind of narcissism at the
heart of a lot of these free birthing people is
the case of a woman named Paula p A A

(38:13):
l A. Her infant son was born extremely early, weighing
only one pound six ounces. He had to spend four
months in the n I See You and only survived
due to intense medical intervention. Paula was forced to give
birth in the hospital because something was very clearly wrong
with her pregnancy, but she still insisted on giving birth
as close to alone as she possibly could. And I'm

(38:35):
just going to read what she wrote on her Facebook
page for a community of other free birthers because it's
it's fucking wild. I took out my ivy lines. Nothing
was being pumped into them at that point anyway, and
my hospital bracelet. I wanted to take a shower with
both arms free of junk. I figured they could put
that crap back on me if it was an emergency,
but I needed to feel like myself again. Did dimension
They tracked and measured everything that came out of my body.

(38:58):
Shortly thereafter, she was an actively her with the premature baby.
She retreated to the hospital bathroom to decide what to do.
Option one, she wrote, called the nurses and either be
prodded while berthing right there, or be wheeled in for
an emergency C section. Option to wake my husband and
labor with him secretly, but then I know he'd lose
his cool and call for help. Option three labor by
myself with my baby just us, and I'd birth him

(39:20):
and catch him and then call for help. Obviously, I
went for option three. It seemed like the safest thing
for my baby and myself At the time. The studies
I'd read didn't report benefits for a C section for
babies of his age. That vaginal would have been safer,
and I knew he'd get drugged up and controlled by strangers,
was going to make things dangerous for me. After a
couple of painful contractions by the toilet, I laid out

(39:41):
a couple of Chuck's padge to catch the blood and crap,
I wish there was coming. Yeah. So, and she she
writes like this about like how good it is and
how important what she's doing is for the safety of
her baby, um, and ignores the fact that her baby
only surve life, being born four months prematurely because of

(40:02):
intense medical intervention, because of doctors and nurses working incredibly
hard with advanced equipment to keep the baby alive. Um.
She makes it all into a story about how cool
it is that she gave birth hiding alone in a
bathroom without telling any of the medical professionals around her. Yeah.
So that's also this movement seems, among many things, like

(40:26):
a disdain for science. Like they're just like science is,
um not cool? But you know when you feel my
baby potentially like the fact that I'm in control and
not some doctor, right not, I mean, it's it's the

(40:47):
like I said, it's the anti vaxer thing, right, It's
just like, um, how could this possibly help even though
this like that. It's just yeah, the the ignoring, the
the science, the fact expind it all. Wowika, Yeah, it's
pretty cool, Caitlin, it's pretty cool. I love it. Yeah

(41:09):
so um. Paula gave herself enormous credit for cheating the
system and giving birth unassisted while ignoring the hard work
of professionals. Her defiant interpretation of a situation she probably
made worse was interpreted as a story of self reliance
by her fellow free birthers instead of a cautionary tale.
It reinforced dangerous ideas in the heads of dozens of women.
In the years since Jeanette Fraser's baby died, the free

(41:31):
birthing movement has grown like the old right, like the
bleached drinking cult, like Q and on, and like dozens
of other toxic subcultures in the fertile substrate provided by Facebook.
Like every subculture, it developed its own media ecosystem, with
its own popular podcasts and news websites and influencers, all
of whom prey upon the ever growing market of hippie,
dippy new mothers to be who don't trust Western medicine.

(41:53):
And that's how Judith, the subject of that viral NBC
article found out about free birthing. I'm going to quote
from that article. Now. Judith worked at a flower shop.
The daily drive was an hour outside of town, time
she filled by listening to podcasts. When she got pregnant,
she devoured episodes of The Birth Hour and Indie Birth,
popular programs on which women shared their childbirth stories, which

(42:13):
ranged from hospital to home births. But it was the
Free Birth podcast that really spoke to Judith. Build as
a supportive space for people who are learning, exploring, and
celebrating their autonomous choices in childbirth. The podcast features Emily
Saldia thirty five, a Los Angeles freebirth advocate and founder
of the Freebirth Society. The group has forty six thousand
followers on Instagram and it's podcast hit a million downloads

(42:36):
last month. Yeah, that's too many. My podcast doesn't even
get that much. And it's amazing, not horrible downloads. A
million downloads in a year. Okay, well, yeah that too
many downloads to Instagram followers, that's thousands of women potentially

(42:57):
endangering their babies. Um, which is God not great, not ideal. Robert,
do you want to know what will not endanger I don't.
I can't even vouch for this because we are because
we're absolutely supported by Mike Bloomberg. Actually, Sophie, I'm glad

(43:18):
you brought that up because I have this new ad
copy from Mike Bloomberg. So I'm just gonna read that
right now. Vote from Mike in he will endanger your babies.
That's the Mike Bloomberg promise. He absolutely promises to endanger
everyone's baby if elected president, and it is in fact,
the only promise he's willing to make. So, you know,
a bold stance by Mike Bloomberg. You gotta respect it. Yeah,

(43:42):
you heard it here, folks. That is an official Bloomberg
campaign ad. Mike Bloomberg will endanger your babies. Nod A required,
No India required. He'll do that for free. All right,
here's some other ads. We're back. So we're talking about

(44:06):
this kind of network of free birthing media circles, primarily podcasts,
and this is part of you know, Caitlin, Podcasting has
been good to both of us. Um I make u
my living at it, and I enjoy it, and I
think I enjoy other people's podcasts that they make, including
the Bechtel Cast. Your podcast. I worry a lot about

(44:27):
podcasts though, UM, and this is we're getting a little
off topic. But like if you read mine comp which
everybody ought to UM, one of the points Adolf Hitler
makes is that like the written word, essentially newspapers and
books by philosolity, that none of that ship convinces large
amounts of people of anything. The human voice is what

(44:49):
can can change people's minds and huge numbers and shift
the destinies of nations. Like that's what is the right
voice at the right time, UM. Saying the right things
can be hypnotizing to large numbers of people, and I
think that's what happens to UM. To this young woman, Judith,
she's she's spending two three hours a day in the car,

(45:11):
she lives out in the sticks. She's listening to the
podcast to help pass the time. And these women on
this free birthing podcast, in the way that podcasting hosts
become to us, becomes sort of like surrogate friends, and
she trust them. And obviously she trusts these women on
this podcast more than she trusts some doctors. She's going
to meet a couple of times, UM, and it's probably

(45:31):
going to be very short on time and like that.
This is one of the things that scares me about podcasts. Um, yeah, yeah,
I I hadn't even fully I tell you rather, Yeah,
I hadn't fully appreciated the power of the voice, the
human voice, and how influential it can be. That is scary, Okay,

(45:54):
I will Yeah, I think on this a bit. I mean,
on the lighthearted an event, we can tell people to
buy bolt cutters and and and the like to to
break into the mansions of the wealthy when society collapses.
But like on the dark side of it, all this
stuff happens too, so it's really a mixed bag podcasting. Thanks. Well,
didn't we learn about this with Dr John Brinkley? Was

(46:16):
that his name? Who like we found that whole radio
thing and was just hawking his his uh fake medicine. Yeah,
there's many people over the rail knew about this. Is
that back in the day, you know, Brinkley was only
able to do that because he had a huge amount
of money from his goatball business to establish a radio

(46:36):
station with. Now anybody can do this. Anybody with any
really fucking dumb idea can build a whole community dedicated
to that dumb idea. For whom that dumb idea will
become more important than anything else, even the lives of
their children. So the podcasts and supporting art industry. Oh,

(47:00):
it's good stuff. It's real good stuff. Everything's a nightmare.
So on the Free Birthing Podcast, Emily Saldia hosted the
most positive stories of free births. Judith was particularly taken
by the tale of one woman who gave birth out
in an unpowered yurt in the mountains of California, with
quote only her husband and a dog she called her midwolf.

(47:22):
Oh no, do not obstetricians. They're wonderful animals, but they
cannot help in a birthing. No. That also just ruined
puns for the rest of my life. I know, and
to this day, I know, to this day the woman
who decided to call her dog her mid wolf. That's

(47:43):
the thing she's proud of. Stuff is that bit of
word play. And I hate it Wolf. I can't get over.
I'm looking in and is shaking her head, going this
is not right, but this is this is like an
aspect of this stories. Like a lot of these women
are like off the grid women, women who live on
arms and stuff, who are actually like probably really competent
in a lot of ways because it's hard to live

(48:04):
that way. I have lived that way, and it's incredibly
difficult and it requires an amount of fortitude. And that's
probably why women like Judith are able to go weeks
past their due date and like the horrible pain that
that involves, because they're tough people. Um and I there's
an extent to it, like I, I fucking hate hospitals,
um and I avoid them at all goddamn costs. I

(48:26):
like living out in the middle of nowhere. Uh. And
I like not relying on anyone for you know things
of of of my daily necessities. I enjoy that. I
understand those impulses. But when you're bringing a baby into
the world, your personal level of comfort with you know,
all that matters less than the child's survival. It just does.

(48:48):
That's part of being a parent, right, is that, like
you put the child first. That's why I don't have
a kid. That's why we've been able to perpetuate the species. Yeah,
caring for the I know, I put Robert over myself.
I pick Robert over myself all the time because he
used my son. But I know, I know, and uh,
that's why you've got three bullets in your shoulder. I know.

(49:12):
So I appreciate you jumping in between me and that
California Highway Patrol officer. But that's a story for another
day and another podcast. Um. So, Judith becomes obsessed with
these stories of you know, these women having free births
in these like amazing and exotic locales in the woods
on top of mountains in foreign countries. Um and she

(49:35):
she like like loves this stuff and listens to it
every day and and recalled later to NBC, I became obsessed.
I would just wonder what's my story going to be like?
And think I want my story to be as badass
as their stories. So you see, like there's a level
of danger here too, and the way that online communities
do everyone pushes each other more extreme. You gave birth

(49:57):
in an unpowered your well, fuck it, I'll give birth
and a ave or something like that. Like So, like
many Americans, Judith entered into this world with a distrust
of doctors. She'd been put under anesthesia as a child
and found the experience frightening. As a college student, a
doctor shrubbed off her in her ear pain, ignoring what
she thought was a real issue. Quote, just calculating all

(50:17):
the experiences I've had with doctors, I never felt heard,
I never felt listened to. And this is an extremely
common complaint from women who give birth in the United States,
very common. A lot of women will tell you I
didn't think the doctor was listening to me. I didn't
feel like they cared about my pain or my situation.
I mean, I mean it's not just then that's I mean,
listen to sludge, you guys, listen to Yeah, like, every

(50:41):
every part of my story is that many people's stories,
which is why we need such a major overhaul of
the American healthcare system, because it is full of a
lot of medical professionals who are uh you, you know,
exhibiting certain biases against certain demographics of people, largely women,

(51:07):
people of color, queer people, people with invisible disabilities, plus
size people. I mean, so many groups of people are
ignored or their pain isn't believed or anything like that.
And uh, like, I can understand why certain people would
be like, yeah, I don't want to deal with like

(51:28):
the health care system. It's completely screwed me over, it's
completely neglected me. But I mean so that, I mean,
the problem it is this system that is so broken.
But it's a lot of the problem is like everything

(51:48):
you've said is very valid, and I would add to that,
a lot of where these women go wrong is like
they recognize that the system is fucked up, and it is,
and they say, like the problem is then the doctors,
we need to just not have doctor is involved, and
it's like no, no, no. A big part of the
problem is actually there aren't nearly enough doctors and they're
all overworked. So even like the really good ones and
the ones who are capable of, like you know, transcending

(52:11):
those biases are also just like overworked and exhausted and
sleep deprived and piste off a lot of the time.
And maybe theyre don't give you the best bedside manner
because they're they're doing way too much work. And if
we had a lot more doctors, not only would you
have a wider a variety of life experiences among medical professionals,
and so you'd have more doctors who might understand members

(52:31):
of these groups, but you would also have less exhausted
doctors and so they'd be able to provide better care. Um,
there's so many problems with our So what we need,
what we need is for anyone who's considering starting a podcast,
don't do it. There's too many. Become a doctor instead,
every single one of you. Stop listening to our podcasts

(52:53):
and go to medicals. You know how easy it is
to just become a doctor. Just do that. Look, if
you're listening to this podcast where you're putting up drywall
for your job as a day labor, drop that fucking
drywall hammer or whatever you used to put up drywall
and go become a doctor right now, right now. Podcasts over. Yeah.

(53:14):
So um. Judith is kind of very primed by her
past bad experiences with doctors to distrust doctors in the
first place. So when she starts listening to this Free
Birthing podcast and hearing its hosts used terms like industrial
obstetric tyranny, and birth rape, she was ready to graft
those words and the idea behind them onto her life.
She watched the Free Birth Society's introduction video hosted by

(53:36):
instructor Yolanda Norris Clark and the business partner of Emily Saldayah,
the host of the Free Birthing podcast, and I want
you to listen to how Yolanda introduces herself in this video, Sophie,
that's your queue. Oh, that's my cue. That's your cue.
I'm Yolanda Clark. I'm a writer, a birth consultant, and
I'm the director of Education with the Free Birth Society.

(53:59):
And my passion and mission in life is to share
the open secret that birth is not an inherently medical event,
but a spontaneous function of biology, and that it is
the pregnant woman herself who possesses inalienable authority over her
birth process. I woke up to the truth about birth
almost eighteen years ago, and since then, I've dedicated my

(54:22):
life to studying birth and supporting euphoric birth. And I've
given birth myself to seven healthy babies in my home
without any involvement from medical professionals at all, from conception
to emergence. I like how she includes uh, conception in there.
I didn't need a doctor present when I was fucking.

(54:44):
Fucking is easy. It doesn't require a doctor. Clearly childbirth
is the same. Yeah. Look, I don't need a doctor
around when I'm shooting off mc gunn, So why do
I need a doctor when I accidentally shoot my son? Yeah?
These wild leaps of logic are Yeah. I also if you.

(55:05):
You weren't the guest for our episodes on Keith Ranieri
in the next um cult. But if you go back
to the old videos of what's her name? That that
lady who was on Smallville, Alison Mac, Alison Mac talking
to Keith Ranieri, and listen to the cadence of their
voices and compare it to the cadence of Yolanda's voice.
They all talk the same way, with the same sort

(55:28):
of speech patterns, and I find that very interesting. Well, okay,
so to quote Hitler, yikes to quote Hitler. I mean,
you know what, There's a couple of things I'll quote
Hitler on in a sense of agreeing with him, and
one of them is how to convince a bunch of
people of something I only knew how to do it.

(55:49):
He wasn't bad. I'm only quoting the quote that you
already said from mine, CLO. But just like the power
of the human voice, right, So, yeah, I hope there
are people out there. I know that we were would
probably edit this out. No, it was wonderful. You cannot
edit audio. You cannot edit a human voice. Um, so

(56:11):
I hope there are enough people out there who can
like detect those like Culty like and now like the
just like propagandy. Yeah, that whole cadence to pick up
on the bullshit that they're spewing. And listeners couldn't see,

(56:32):
but she was doing this like almost like conductor like
hand motion the entire time. That was also very flowy
and swaye and Culty, Yes, thank you so much. Um yeah, so,
I mean I think, I mean, Robert, obviously you picked
up on it. Like, I just hope that for the
people out there who like listen to all these podcasts

(56:54):
out there, and they can, like they can tell when
people are being scary and spewing propaganda bullshit, and I
hope that they understand that when I tell them to
purchase bolt cutters and uh and okay um. So later

(57:16):
in that video, Yolanda warns against inducing labor, calling it
an eviction from the womb and basically arguing that it's
traumatic to the infant. She brags about taking her pregnancies
well past the normal forty weeks. In Yolanda's eyes, the
idea that the risk of still births rises rapidly after
forty two weeks is nonsense. She states, Babies come out.

(57:36):
Babies always come out, so when Judith's pregnancy crept past
forty two weeks, she assured herself it was fine by
remembering Yolanda's words. She also sought reinforcement from her friends
in the free Birthing Facebook group. Things were not fine,
of course, and her baby was in fact still born.
The only good news in this terrible story is that

(57:57):
this horrific tragedy shocked Judith out of the weird little
Internet cult she'd gotten drawn into. As she told NBC,
I think I brainwashed myself with the Internet, and I
that's what happened. The Internet like the fact that Judith
was capable of realizing this and acknowledging the bad decisions
that that set her on this path should key you
in on the critical fact that she's not a dumb person.

(58:18):
She's a person who did a dumb thing with a
horrible consequence, but she herself as an intelligent, capable, reasonable
human being. The Internet made her stupid. This doesn't take
away from her culpability in the tragedy, and she definitely
has quite a lot here, but it does highlight a
critical reality. Without this massive ecosystem totally tens of thousands
of people and hundreds of dedicated content creators. Judith would

(58:40):
not have been able to convince herself to make these
bad decisions. This, this just wouldn't have happened in an
age in which this, this Internet infrastructure didn't exist. The
train of things that led to Judith stillbirth bears tremendous
similarities to the radicalization pathway for numerous neo Nazi and
white supremacist terrorists. Some dumb kid comes across a really
transgressive podcast or a review of a movie they like

(59:03):
by some YouTuber like Stefon Molineux, and that leads them
to other content and eventually a more extreme communities, and
after a few months or a few years, you've got
yourself a committed white supremacist. And as is the case
with all these new Nazis we're dealing with, there are
specific individuals to blame for creating the radicalization pathways in
the free birthing community. The Internet may have made Judith stupid,

(59:25):
but it didn't do so on its own, and the
two people most responsible for the spread of the free
birthing movement and it's modern deadly dimensions are Emily Seldiah
and Yolanda Norris Clark. They wind up in every single
one of these stories. Take the case of Lisa, a
twenty nine year old Californian who talked to The Daily Beast.
Lisa had been living off the grid in an eco

(59:46):
friendly sort of you know situation in the middle of
nowhere when she found a free birthing page on Instagram.
The idea immediately appealed to her, and she joined the
Free Birthing Facebook group that Emily Seldia ran. Like Judith,
she kept her new friends up to day with her pregnancy.
Quote been in labor for days. Thought I was in
transition at PM, but now it's three am and it's

(01:00:06):
intensely painful. Like I just want to lie down and
for the pain to stop for a second. Saldiah reached
out to her via Facebook messenger to give support. Other
group members left comments like you're a legend. It will happen.
Like Justine. Lisa's pregnancy went on for far too long.
Her baby was also born dead. She made a quick
post to the Freebirth Societies Facebook group and people they're

(01:00:29):
sympathized with her, But the important work of radicalizing other
pregnant women to avoid hospitals and even midwives continued, or
at least it would have if not for what happened next.
And I'm going to quote from the Daily Beast again here.
A group of concerned outsiders worried the free Birthers were
being reckless and set up fake sock puppet accounts to
gain intrigue to the private group and monitor its members.

(01:00:49):
The interlopers saw themselves as centuries keeping watch over alternative
lifestyle practitioners. They believe we're putting their babies in harm.
The sock puppets took screenshots of Lisa's comments and posted
them in their own groups, sparking instant outcry from their followers.
Some of them marveled at why anyone would take such
a risk with the pregnancy, while others blamed Seldia for
luring impressionable women into a dangerous practice. Others were more vicious.

(01:01:11):
The twat from the Free Birth Society needs drop kicking
out of a fucking window. One person wrote, I wouldn't
mind seeing this monster swinging from a light post at it. Another.
So that's all the Internet that you and I know
and love, Caitlin Um. Yeah. These eruptions of death threats
and outrage by anti free breathing activists came to follow
every new dead baby story. When baby journey Moon died

(01:01:32):
in two thousand eighteen, the weight of attention and outrage
leveled against the Free Birth Society caused Emily Saldia to
close all four of her Facebook groups. And here's what
she wrote in the post announcing this and oh boy,
strap in for this one game, dear community, it is
with a heavy heart that we officially announced the closing
of our four wonderful groups here on Facebook as of

(01:01:55):
November one. All members will be removed in the group's
closed permanently. As many of you know, a member of
our private Freebirth Society group tragically lost her baby during
the birth process earlier this year. The painful reality is
that babies do sometimes die in all settings, including the hospital,
and every pregnant woman was content with the possibility of
death which exists for each of us. Babies just die uh.

(01:02:17):
Emily went on to complain about her own death threats,
the ones that she had received from anti free birthing activists,
and closed the post by announcing, in light of all this,
we at Freebirth Society and are advancing our plan to
move off Facebook to a safe and private membership platform
m hm. Patreon. Yeah, that's actually exactly what they're doing.
It's not Patreon, but that's the exactly the goal. This

(01:02:40):
is a grift um. The private membership platform is not free.
It cost a hundred and eight dollars to be a member.
And since her Facebook group had more than six thousand
members when she closed it down, the amount of more
or forty six thousand members which she closed it down,
the amount of money on the line here is potentially significant.
And that's not the whole of the grift it's barely
the start. Emily and Yolanda run a web's free Birth

(01:03:00):
Society dot com on it. You can buy a coffee
table book she rises, an annual edition of The Wild Mother,
which is another thing these people call themselves for. You
can also pay for a number of different cool services, Caitlin,
you're gonna love hearing about this. There's the Lighthouse Leaders
Group coaching series from a hundred and seventy five dollars,

(01:03:21):
Birth Trauma Debrief for a hundred and fifty dollars, Radical
Birthkeeper Consultation for a hundred dollars, Self Mastery coaching for
a hundred and fifty dollars, an undisturbed birth education and
prep for a hundred and fifty dollars. Now, I bet
you wondering what is what is Radical Birthkeeper Consultation? I
am wondering that, Please tell me. So I looked into

(01:03:43):
it and it turns out it's a guide for other
women to start their own business in the radical birthwork field.
Cool Is there a market for that? Well? Because these
ladies are making bank and Yolanda make it. A ton
who wouldn't want to make money off of this? It's
like making a money as a midwife, but with all
all of that pass key training and apprenticeship and learning

(01:04:06):
useful medical ship. Oh good god. Here's a quote from
the the page for that that thing new to birthwork,
not sure where to start, or maybe you've been attending
births for a while and you're feeling sick. If you're
called to Radical Birthwork, identified by us as Standing within
four Women, we are here to help you brainstorm business

(01:04:28):
ideas and dive into all things birthwork. We have effectively
coached many women who want to launch their birth businesses
but don't know where to start or feel stymied by
the pressures that they perceive from general social climate around
birth or worry as to what and how to charge
for their services. During the session, we will help you
cut through the noise of self judgment and help you
clarify your birthwork superpower and project your vision to the world,

(01:04:50):
implement your passion and translate it into working with women
with the highest integrity. This is a sixty minute session
that will be done over FaceTime or zoom. Okay, so
let me let me understand this. So they are basically
they offer this service where you can consult with someone

(01:05:10):
to learn how to be a person who will be
present at free births, just to like help out in
case anything goes wrong. So they acknowledge the need for
people to be there, just people with actual medical medical training. Yeah,

(01:05:31):
oh wow, Okay, this is kind of where I start
to see it as like I don't think like Justine obviously,
the one we've talked to the most, like there was
no grift for her. She just thought this was the
best thing to do um and she was wrong. But
these women, Yolanda Emily Seldiah and Yolanda Norris clark Um,
these are people who just want the respect and money

(01:05:52):
that a real professional like a midwife or a doctor
receives as a result of what they do, but they
don't want to take any training or get any kind
of license or be told by anyone that whatever crazy
ideas they have about birth are aren't like right. So
they've just built up this community where they're treated like
real medical professionals and essentially train other people and how

(01:06:13):
to give birth without actually knowing how to train other
people how to help give birth with no train like
train people to not be trained. Yeah, it's mind boggling.
It's incredible. And if you decide, Caitlin, that you want
comprehensive coaching and how to free birth your own baby,
Emily and Yolanda will be more than happy to help you.

(01:06:34):
For a price. Their full coaching package is a bargain
at just eight Oh yeah, well, I have decided that
I want their help, so I'm going to start saving up.
Midwives have to go to a place. Just give it
on Skype baby, that's the way easier. Now. I can't

(01:06:58):
say for certain that Lisa, one of the mothers whose
baby died, was actively paying Yolanda and Emily for birth coaching,
but the fact that she's mentioned getting Facebook messages from
Saldia makes me think that she was uh and the
precise wording of how the Daily Beasts discussed this as
suspicious to me. Quote Saldaia says she provided no advice
to Lisa and never even spoke to her on the

(01:07:19):
phone doesn't mean she didn't. Different medium Maybe then, yeah,
maybe I found Yolanda Norris Clark on Facebook and Instagram.
She goes by bao house wife and sends out free
birthing memes and updates to her combined twelve thousand followers.
Here's one example. The idea that governments could ever have

(01:07:41):
the legitimate jurisdiction to designate birthworkers or license birthwork in
any capacity should be preposterous and outrageous to everyone. The
fact that it isn't, and that so many women especially
have accepted and even welcomed the appropriation of midwife re
by the patriarchal, false authority of the official institutions just
reinforces the task that we have at hand to rewild
and re authenticate our relationship to ourselves, to motherhood, to

(01:08:03):
our bodies, to our children, and to each other. Hashtag
radical birthkeeper, hashtag radical birthwork, hashtag house wife, hashtag free birth,
hashtag homebirth hashtag wildbirth, hashtag free birth Society, hashtag free
birth Society, Radical Birthkeepers School, hashtag radical birthkeeper School, hashtag
free birth Society. Okay, so these are like the turfs

(01:08:24):
of birth there, these are birth turfs. Yeah, they're like you,
we were so right before you said they were like
co opting certain like language in terms of like pro
choice language, and then but then they've just taken it
to this such this horribly harmful radical Yikes. She has

(01:08:49):
her own branded means. One of them reads governments have
no business in birth. Birth belongs to women, which like, yeah,
but when your baby dies because you like ignored science, Yeah,
the baby has some rights too at the point at
which it's coming out. Yeah. Now, the kind of this

(01:09:13):
kind of language is powerfully effective to the women who
wind up in these groups. Studies have been done on
the freebirth and community in the US and Australia and
four key things come up over and over again when
women say how they found this community. And I'm quoting
from a paper commissioned by Evidence based Midwifery. So this
is a midwives like organization, rejection of the medical and
midwifery models of birth, faith in the birth process, autonomy,

(01:09:36):
and agency. There was a prevailing sense of choosing to
freebirth in order to retain choice, control, and autonomy over
their bodies during the birth process. It's about control. Another
analysis I found on the conversation backs up this interpretation quote.
Where home birth services were available, some women did not
want the routine care that is provided by midwives. This
was largely due to the belief that routine care practices

(01:09:56):
would cause interference that would get in the way of
their ability to birth safe. Additionally, they were concerned that
they may face coercion should they decline aspects of care
provided by the midwives. Therefore, they did not want care
imposed upon them during childbirth. The researchers findings across all
studies agreed that women ought to retain full control and
autonomy throughout their experience of giving birth and need they
felt maternity services were unable to meet. Yeah, because you can.

(01:10:21):
You don't. You can't. It's not you don't own the baby.
Once it's coming out, it's not your property, a thing.
It's like it's leaving, it's it's it's getting on out
of there. Yeah. Oh gosh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I just
you hate you hate to see it where they're like,

(01:10:43):
they're like, yes, women's autonomy and agency and like, these
are things I so strongly agree with, and they're but
they're they've just taken into this horrible, horrible place. They
really do it rules Like I don't enjoy getting a
pap smeir, but I'm not going to do it to

(01:11:04):
myself because I don't fucking know how. Yeah, I have
given myself a pap smeir, but I don't know what
a pap smear is. So I I just kind of
you know, Robert May I explained to you what a
pap smear is. I think the reality of that situation,
Caitlin is between me and my hammer. I'll let you

(01:11:29):
look at it. I'm pretty sure I'm good at it.
It's unpleasant, to say the least. I'm starting the self
schmir community actually, oh, the free schmeing, free smears. A
lot of people say men cannot get and give themselves
pap smears, even hammers, but my Facebook group says otherwise. Uh, Well,

(01:11:50):
as long as um babies are not dying, I guess
that's that's what's important here. No, no babies dying, some
some people, some adults. Yeah, uh now, the sad reality
is that more and more babies are going to keep
dying as a result of the free birthing movement. Emily
Saldaya and Yolanda Norris Clark will continue podcasting and meming

(01:12:13):
and making bank while America's infant mortality rate ticks ever higher.
The NBC article that came out earlier this year helped
to highlight the movement, but in the end it may
just draw more women into the movement's mall. That's certainly
what Emily Saldiah thinks. In the immediate wake of the
NBC article, which was focused around the death of a
child from someone who followed Emily's instructions to a t
she posted this on Instagram. Hey guys, no podcast this week.

(01:12:37):
Decided to prioritize self care and create some spaciousness to
relax and be fully present with my baby after an
insane month of working my ass off on this membership launch.
I'm extremely proud of what we've built and it feels
so good to be off Facebook. Thank you for the
outpouring of love and support I've reach received in this
hard as fun past six weeks. Someday, when I'm ready,
I will talk at length about my experience on this
full on cyber attack, but for now it's only furthered.

(01:13:00):
By resolving this work, truth and light will always shine
brighter and carry more endurance. And in the words of
Lena Dunham, no one that actually knows me thinks I'm
an asshole, and that's what matters. When you know and
love who you are, you're unshakable. The bright side of
all this weird media attention is it's brought a ton
of women to this movement. So fuck yes to transmitting
people's traumatized shit energy into something powerful and exciting. Big

(01:13:22):
bicep emoticon, fist emoticon, And to all the haters out
here that have gotten weirdly obsessed with me, I still
got all the love in my heart for you, and
I will keep fighting for you, whether you're with me
or not. Fire emoticon, hert emoticon, hert emoticon, hertomoticon, heart emoticon,
heart emoticon. Hashtag Free Birth Society, hashtag the Free Birth Podcast,
hashtag haters Gonna Hate Strong Women hashtag smash the patriarchy,

(01:13:42):
hashtag calling bullshit hashtag light winds hashtag I Am Not
afraid hashtag strong as fuck hashtag Lena Dunham, You Inspire
Me hashtag by by Facebook women are taking advice on
their babies health care from this person. That's so scary. Also,

(01:14:03):
if I like, if I if it like, if I,
I can't even speak it's amazing, it's astonishing, labbergasted. I
think if I if like, if my feminism ever inspired
like free birthers to be like, yeah, smash the patriarchy,
I will I don't know what I will do. I

(01:14:24):
will have to just like log off and never be
present in the world again. Like if my message somehow
gets convoluted to like this version of scary radical free
birth feminism horrifying. Yeah, yeah, you don't have to give
birth in a hospital, but you do have to consult

(01:14:45):
medical professionals about your birth to do so responsibly, because
when you decide you're bringing a baby into the world,
it's not all about you anymore. Um, But it is
all about you when you're performing a home pap smear
as a man. And that's why you should join my
Facebook group man Smearing, where we're teaching each other how
to recapture pap smearing from the medical industrial establishment and

(01:15:09):
the feminist establishment and remail and rewild pap smears for
all of the men who have access to home depot hammers.
I don't even know how to respond to that, cait Um,
I will say this if what wouldn't it be funny

(01:15:31):
if they were like m r A s out there
who were like um, men should be able to get
pap smears too. And then and then they go on
and buy a speculum or sorry, a hammer and hammer
the male pap smear is performed with a hammer. I see, um, well,

(01:15:53):
I just I just keeel good, feel great. I just
keep going back to like one of the roots of
the problem that off that births the free birth movement.
See what I did there, Midwolf okay, um is the
broken American health care system. And if we totally find

(01:16:17):
a way to fix that, I feel like there would
there would never be a need any any you know
mother's to feel the need to have a free birthing experience. Um.
So that I mean, I mean, gosh, I feel sick. Well,

(01:16:45):
if you're feeling sick, that means it's the perfect time
to plug your plug doubles, because nothing cures your ailments
like a solid plug. Thank you well, I'll start with
Sludge and American Healthcare Story, my podcast about my experience
finding out that I had gall stones and the very
long and arduous process that it took from me to

(01:17:07):
get surgery to get them taken out. So check out
that and it's amazing. Thank you so much, Sophie. I
keep um saying, yeah, I'm releasing season two soon and
I don't know when that's going to happen, but it'll
happen someday. But season two focuses on other people's medical
nightmare stories. So fans and medical nightmares. Yeah, I mean

(01:17:31):
I want, I will sure, Yeah, I'll have anyone on
if anyone has a medical that's the other thing. If
people have medical horror stories, UM, please email them to
me at Sludge Story podcast at gmail dot com. Um,
I'll probably feature them on the podcast again when I
start releasing episodes someday. Um. Yeah, I just I want

(01:17:55):
to have faith in a health care system. Um, it
just needs to be very much revamped. So um yeah,
let's work on that society anyway. Um. You can listen
to my less of a bummer podcast, The Bechtel Cast,
which is also still kind of a bummer sometimes because
it's all about how, um, most movies are horrible to women. UM,

(01:18:21):
so you know sometimes they're not, though, and those episodes
are nice. Um. And then you can follow me on
Twitter and Instagram at Caitlin durante um and uh yeah,
I think that's that's about it. And you can find
me on the internet at man schmearing dot com and

(01:18:43):
the man Smearing Facebook group where we talk about how
to reclaim our wherever you do that from doctors and
the them an atriarchy. Um. That's that's at the end
of the episode. So what Robert meant to say is
he's at I Ride Okay on Twitter or at Bastard

(01:19:04):
Spot on Twitter. On Instagram, we have a te public store.
Robert also hosts Worst You're Ever. Uh I have Twitter, yes,
so like your Twitter. I've actually never I've actually never
said it out loud. It's why Underscore, Sophie Underscore, Why

(01:19:25):
Anderson Content. That's it, okay, So why Sophie, I why okay?
And then because you're a professional, okay, So follow Sophie
Ray Lectorman at on Twitter at why Underscore, Sophie Underscore
Why and then he features Anderson content. I thought the
whole handle for a second. Was that professional like you,

(01:19:47):
I'm a hack in a fraud. That episode