'Free birth' Radical influencers in spotlight after death of a mother

Over a weekend in late June 2024, Emilee Saldaya, the leader of the Free Birth Society, hosted a festival on her 21-hectare (52-acre) property in North Carolina. It was a celebratory gathering for FBS, a multimillion-dollar business that promotes a radical approach to giving birth without medical support.

- Sirin Kale Lucy Osborne

Promotional footage from the Matriarch Rising festival shows Saldaya dancing beside her private lake, wearing a crown. That same weekend, more than 3,000 miles away, in Dundalk, on the east coast of Ireland, Naomi James bled to death after freebirthing her son.

It is impossible to say with any certainty whether James would have survived if a midwife or doctor had been present.

Neither is it possible to know exactly how influential FBS was on James's decision-making, although she appears to have been scarred by bad experiences with maternity services. Yet the 38-year-old photographer's social media accounts shed light on the kind of content she was consuming during her pregnancy, which was considered high risk because of her two previous caesarean sections.

On 21 February 2024, James liked a post captioned "freebirth rocks" that was hashtagged #freebirthsociety. The following month, she appears to have been recommended an FBS podcast called The Freebirther's Guide to Hemorrhage with Yolande NorrisClark by her doula. "Definitely one to listen to," wrote the doula in a comment, which tagged James, beneath the episode on Instagram.

It is not known whether James listened to the episode, in which Saldaya said that, while she had seen "tonnes of haemorrhage manufactured in the hospital" as a result of unnecessary interventions, she had never seen a haemorrhage in a free birth.

"From what I know to be true," said Saldaya, "I have never once, not one time, seen or heard of a situation where a mother died from any complications at home, but specifically we're talking about blood loss." Three months later, on 23 June 2024, James died of a postpartum haemorrhage after her free birth.

An investigation by the Guardian last week found 48 cases of late-term stillbirths or neonatal deaths or other forms of serious harm involving mothers or birth attendants who appear to be linked to FBS.