This is The Guardian. Hi, I'm Shirin Kale, and I'm Lucy Osborne. You're listening to The Birth Keepers, a new six-part series from The Guardian Investigates. Just before we start, this series contains references to baby loss and maternal harm. That video we told you about at the end of episode 4, it marked a new chapter in our investigation. Shrin and I had been monitoring FBS for months, but after watching that video, we dropped everything else. All our other stories. That image was all we could think about. We started making calls. We hit the road. So we're here in Omaha, in the Midwest of America. Travelling around the United States. It's just all farms, isn't it? It's just agricultural equipment. I'm just driving down this dirt track now. We wanted to find out how many people have been influenced by FBS. It's like, I just, every time you get that message from somebody, like from a source saying, oh, there's been another stillbirth, you just have this feeling of, like, fear. Like, I've never felt anything like it. And what was the scale of the possible harm? There's just this... absolute trail of destruction. We'd knocked on this door, and once it opened, there was no way of shutting it. But soon we realised it wasn't just America. Yeah, Ernie's neighbourhood, it's in the southern suburbs of Cape Town in South Africa. Hi. You speak English and French here? Right. That's perfect, we can do both. Emily and Yolanda had grown an ideology and seeded it globally. FBS was taking root in communities across the world. Here's Emily on a call with MMI students. Maybe what we could do while people are still finding their way here is have a little fun orchestra of coming off mute and saying where you are. I'm in New Mexico. Franklin, Tennessee. Arizona. I'm in Austria. I'm in Nebraska. London. Sweden. I'm in Ireland. I'm from Serbia. I'm in Rocha, Uruguay. I'm in Cape Town, England. A reach we could never have fathomed when we started reporting this story. From The Guardian Investigates, I'm Lucy Osborne. I'm Shuin Kale. This is The Birth Keepers. Episode 5. FBS Goes Global. Emily. She's always on her phone. We knew that early in our reporting. That's understandable for a successful influencer. But then Lucy asked serendipity something and her answer really caught our attention. how often was emily directly speaking to women during their labors that you were aware of um from my perception every day actually during the yeah yeah women were not necessarily always on the phone but women were constantly texting her like labor starting this is where i'm at in labor this is what i'm you know like and yeah like every single time i was with her on her property or anywhere she was texting with a woman in labor and can you recall any times where she was telling a woman don't go to hospital i've never heard her tell somebody directly not to go to the hospital but i but like when we're all over at her house and somebody's texting her in labor like she'll bring it up to everyone who's there and then we'll all talk about it and there's many times that we've been like, oh, is this like, does she need to go to the hospital for this? And we're probably like, no, she doesn't need to go to the hospital for that. This was shocking because it suggests that Emily never stopped offering women advice during their labor, even after the death of Lauren's baby, Journey Moon, who you heard about in episode three. Hey, I just spoke to Adair. Really sad. Her daughter died in ****. Emily was advising during the birth. It was like five-day labour, heavy mucony, and baby was breached. And who, like, I dare need through FBS pulled Emily, apparently. Hey, thanks for the update. I don't know, I just find it really shocking that these people that we're speaking to now, Emily has been directly involved in their birth. I sort of assumed that after Journey Moon that she'd have stopped doing that or doing that less. As we began to try and work out the extent of FPS influence, finding more and more cases, they seemed to fit into different patterns. The image that comes to mind is a stone being thrown into a pond. Ripples of influence spreading out from FPS at the centre. And the first ripple, the closest to them, is Emily on her phone, texting women in labour. I was just thinking, like, just feeling like I just want it to be over. You know, then this thought started to come up of, like, this can't be normal. Like, this cannot be, like, normal, the way things are supposed to go. That's Hayley Bordeaux. We're not going to give you a play-by-play of Hayley's labour. What you need to know is that it's 2024, she's had a wild pregnancy, and something felt seriously wrong. The pain was excruciating. A friend at her birth suggested they text Emily. Emily got on a call with Hayley, Hayley's friend, and Hayley's husband, Stephen. We were probably about to go to the hospital. And I remember Emily saying, the hospital has nothing for you. That's what she said, the hospital has nothing for you. Yeah. The hospital has nothing for you. like they would just make things worse like you don't want to go there that's hayley's husband steven you know hayley was telling emily the pain is unbearable and she just said oh that's that's just birth that's just birth you know and gave us a lot of reassurance around two days later still at home the baby still having not arrived emily spoke to hayley and Stephen again. Haley was just saying, why is it taking so long? It shouldn't feel this painful. I just want to die. And Emily went into this pseudo spiritual rant saying, oh girl, you know, time doesn't exist. You got this. It really felt like we had just locked ourselves in a cage and like threw away the the key late in the evening of the 27th of january five days after her waters broke hayley went blind they raced to hospital hayley son was born safely by c but Hayley didn see him Found out that I had had like four or five strokes during the labour And that's what caused the vision loss. And that was from the high blood pressure. And I was just so lucky that my vision came all the way back. But like some of the pictures, you know, in our hospital room, And it's like, my face is just like total blank. Like, I don't know if my vision was back at that point or not, but like, I look like dead inside. Hayley's friend texted Emily. She said the doctors diagnosed Hayley's temporary loss of vision as the result of severe preeclampsia. Emily responded, quote, She doesn't have severe preeclampsia. That's so entirely retarded. She's a normal, healthy woman. After this happened, Emily emailed Haley saying, I'm really sorry that my involvement in your birth wasn't what you wanted slash needed. But privately, Emily was less conciliatory. Here's what she told students about Haley. She transferred and wound up having seizures, I think. Yeah. And had a C-section and was labelled preeclamptic. and afterwards made up a pretty big story about me and made up a story that I almost killed her. So that's Ripple 1. Emily on her phone, texting women in labour. The second Ripple. Women who didn't directly speak to Emily or Yolanda. during their labours, but did consume FBS content. We couldn't believe how many of these women there were scattered across the world, from Switzerland to France, Australia to Thailand. One of the stories that really demonstrates the reach of FBS is the story of Gabby Lopez. Her husband was there, and so were three local friends. All of the women, all four of them, had met through the FBS membership. Felt like life-changing, essentially, to say, but just I felt like I was meeting my sisters, you know, for life. What you're hearing is a video recording of Gabby's birth. It might sound like a serene scene, and in many ways, it was. That's because no one in the room realized that what was unfolding was actually a life-threatening situation. You're doing so good, baby. When Gabby's son Esau's head was born, his body got stuck on her pelvic bone. The head's out. What she was experiencing was shoulder dystocia, an emergency that occurs in up to 1% of vaginal births, and one that medical professionals are trained to resolve. None of the women in that room had any medical training, But all of the women had consumed FBS materials. And so what they had in their minds were those teachings that birth is safe and to trust the process. But somewhere, deep inside her, was Gabby's intuition. I guess deep down I knew that he was stuck, that something was wrong. I said something like, can you reach in? Can you get him out? Can someone get him out? Instead of listening to her and responding to what she was actually saying, I think I was just kind of regurgitating this dogma that I had chosen to entrench myself in. This is Sarah, one of Gabby's FBS friends who was with her during the Labour. It really felt we entered some sort of time warp. There's your baby. That's it. Oh, you're so close, Cap. Have the shoulders out, baby. You're so close. After five minutes, if a baby is stuck at a medically attended birth, it's an emergency. Esau was stuck, in the end, for 17 minutes. And with each minute, he was sustaining an irreversible brain injury. When Isa was born, he wasn't breathing. But FBS teaches its followers to give the baby time to breathe. So they did. Can you air? And just need to roll the cord. Perfect. But minutes later, Gabby's maternal instinct kicked in and overrode her FBS education. Gabby started doing CPR while Sarah googled how to do it. Someone else called an ambulance. I wish we had been quicker to call 911 because once the paramedics came, they were able to resuscitate him, I believe, relatively quickly. Esau was taken to paediatric intensive care where he stayed for 21 days. Now age three, he is severely disabled and fed through a feeding tube. I met Esau. He's a sweet and sensitive boy and loves Miss Rachel and Sesame Street. But you can see he gets frustrated when he can't do things his little brother can do. Gabby sometimes struggles to understand how this happened to her family she looks back at her time in FBS and doesn't recognize herself nobody joins a cult willingly nobody um you know you think you're joining like a great movement and I was just so and like captivated by by their message so I felt like it just felt almost too good to be true which I think was the case FBS is not, by any conventional definition, a cult But Gabby is not the only one who used that word Former FBS members often use this kind of language To describe the hold they feel the organisation had over them After leaving FBS, Gabby discovered that there were other children, like Esau Who were seriously injured or died It was very upsetting for me to learn that it happened not one, not two, not three, not four, but multiple times after me. As Shuren and I continued our investigation, we started hearing this phrase, the lost mums. It's a term that former FBS members use, women who had lost their babies in free births. Many didn't want to speak to us because of the shame and the stigma they felt and also just the raw grief associated with losing a child. Some seemed to be hiding themselves from the world. But slowly, women started to open up. So I spoke to someone called Just let you know I just spoken to another lost mum She lost two babies during free births This is... She... Had her daughter in 2022. She was heavily influenced by FBS. Just, yeah, another really sad one. She lost her daughter in 2025. Hey, I just spoke to another woman called... who also had postpartum hemorrhage and nearly died at home. After this mother's daughter died, she commented on the FBS Instagram account. Her comment had been deleted and she'd been blocked shortly after she posted that. And the baby suffered severe oxygen deprivation and died six and a half months later. The mother said, I had their words in my mind, I had their video played in my mind and my daughter began showing signs of distress. It's a really sad story. This one really sticks with me, actually. A daughter passed away in her arms. It's just another, it's just really, really sad. And it just makes you wonder how many other women there are around the world. Like, how much more of there is this that we haven't come across yet? Coming up, FBS birth keepers go out into the world. So, the first two ripples are Emily and Yolanda influencing women, either directly in a conversation or indirectly via their podcasts and courses. But the next ripple in the water was the influence of women who had been trained by FBS in courses including RBK, the Radical Birthkeeper School. You remember the RBK school. It's the one that taught women how to be, what they called, authentic midwives in three months on Zoom. Some women hired RBKs knowing they were trained by FBS but thinking they had life-saving skills. They learned too late that they didn't. But others, some thousands of miles away from the US, had no idea what FBS was. I have never heard of something like a birth keeper in my life. Ernest the Chirwa, Ernie, lives in Cape Town, South Africa. Ernie and her husband Chifundo were introduced to a woman called Caitlin Collins through a friend. That was in 2021, the same year Caitlin graduated from the radical birth keeper school. How did Caitlin introduce herself to you? What did you understand of Caitlin's job? She introduced herself to me as a midwife. That's how Ernie and Chifundo remember that meeting. This is their account of what happened next. Caitlin, who is now a significant figure in FBS, denies she ever presented herself as a midwife or medical professional and disputes much of Ernie and Chifundo's account of events. We'll come to Caitlin's version after. Ernie, who was a cleaner at the time, could not afford what she said was Caitlin's fee. But, as her husband was a tailor, Ernie said that Caitlin agreed to accept clothing instead of cash. During your prenatal care with Caitlin, did she ever take your blood pressure? No, she never took any blood pressure. Did she ever measure the size of your bump? No, she didn't. Did she ever take a urine sample? No, she didn't. Did she ever take your blood? No. Did you understand at the time that that wasn't what most prenatal care is like under midwives? Or did you think you were in safe hands? I just thought I was in safe arms because it was my first pregnancy, so I wasn't quite aware of what happened. So you trusted her? I fully trusted her because I've met like two or three white couples also visiting her at our place. Yeah, so I was like, if these people keep on coming here, that means she's a top class, she's a top notch. Had Ernie received standard ultrasounds during her pregnancy, she would have learned that she was pregnant with twins. Experts recommend a planned birth for twins at 36 to 37 weeks. Instead, Ernie went to 43 weeks of pregnancy. Chifundo texted Caitlin to check if it was normal to go past Ernie's due date. Caitlin replied, Can be normal. Those dates are a rough estimate. The most important thing is your baby moving lots, and Ernie is feeling good. On the 14th of February 2022, Ernie went into labour. Caitlin arrived at her house just after midnight. Instead of examining her, Caitlin turned off all the lights. Just switched off the lights also in the living room. Then my husband asked her, like, is it OK to switch off the lights? Then she was like, yeah, actually it helps a woman in labour to keep cool. Then, Ernie says, Caitlin fell asleep. All of a sudden she fell asleep on the couch. At around 2am, Ernie says she and her husband Chifundo wrote up Caitlin, who briefly checked her before going back to sleep. All of a sudden again, Caitlin fell asleep on the bed. while I was lying on the floor. I kept on waiting while she was asleep there and I was getting so tired. Just another tissue. That's fine, that's fine. Then, around 5am, they woke up Caitlin again. Caitlin checked Ernie and saw a baby's foot was hanging out. They decided to go to the hospital. On the drive there, Ernie says that Caitlin asked them to not mention that they were trying to have a home birth. I was so shocked, like, why is she asking us not to mention that we were trying to have a home birth? Now, before we entered into the hospital gate, the hospital entrance then. She just wanted to just drop us outside of the gate. Then my husband said, you know what Caitlin, Annie can't move. Can you drive us inside? So she said okay. Then she drove us inside. Then she just left. Caitlin had dropped them at Retreat Day Hospital, the nearest hospital, but one that specialises in low-risk care. The staff there called an ambulance to take Ernie to another hospital, a facility better suited for the medical emergency she was in. She waited two hours to be transferred. By the time she arrived, her daughter Quelly's heartbeat had stopped. By 13 past 10, my my baby daughter was born that time then they said I sorry Annie It your daughter but she stillborn Then I heard the nurse telling me, you know what? There's still another baby inside. And let's hope that this one is alive. That's when I came to know that I was carrying twins. But her son Kwesi had died in utero a day or so before. I'm into the room, into the world, and everyone is holding their babies and I'm the only patient there. I just felt so empty. Ernie would later learn that Caitlin had a reputation amongst the medical community in Cape Town. Although Caitlin had trained as a midwife, she wasn't actually licensed in South Africa because her qualification was from the US. In 2020 and 2021, two stillbirths were linked to the practice she ran with her business partner in an 18-month period. In November 2021, while Ernie was still pregnant with the twins she didn't know she was having, Caitlin was told by the local health authority to stop practising until she registered. But Caitlin didn't tell Ernie. She kept her as a client. Later, Ernie and Shifundo sued Caitlin for alleged negligent care. They also reported her to the police in Cape Town. The police have not responded to repeated requests for comments. Caitlin also declined to comment, but in her defence in the ongoing lawsuit, she said that she unequivocally told Ernie and Chifundo that she was a birth keeper and that she'd always make that clear. She denied the couple's account of the car journey and hospital drop-off. She also denied receiving payment for her work, saying the skirt Chifundo made her was a gift. Caitlin's lawyers claimed she advised the couple to register with health professionals. And it was Ernie and Chufundo's negligence, they said, that contributed to the death of the twins. In June this year, Caitlin made a special appearance at FPS's Matriarch Rising Festival. Caitlin had a dance workshop and DJed under the name DJ Kundi, playing tribal-themed dance music. We have DJ Kundi in the house! Do you want to give us a vibe of what you're going for or do you just want to surprise them? Standing next to her was Emily Saldea. Here's a thought that stopped us in our tracks when we were reporting on RBKs There are now more than 850 of them around the world Potentially with dozens of clients Many of them are still attending births So how many more cases like Ernie's are there? It's impossible to know When a free birth goes wrong, no one can say with any certainty that the outcome would have been different with a doctor or midwife present Tragically, babies do die in hospitals too However, after a year-long investigation here is what we found We identified 48 cases of baby deaths or serious harm involving mothers or birth attendants who appear to be linked to FBS. In 18 of these cases, evidence suggests that FBS played a significant role in decision-making that led to potentially avoidable tragedies. I always find it hard talking about these things in terms of stats, figures. These are real people. The devastation and the heartbreak would stay with us for weeks after we hung up the phone or got back in our cars. To be honest, some of these stories will stay with us forever. We weren't the only ones disturbed by the growing number of deaths connected to FBS. Remember the backlash that began on Reddit that we mentioned at the end of the last episode? It was called the Free Birth Society scam. It started in March and quickly snowballed with hundreds of new comments each week. By August, Emily and Yolanda decided to respond to it in a new episode. And it was staggering. These lonely, bitter women banded together and created, as you said, a little hate club so that they could feel a sense of validation and, ironically, community when they realized that they actually weren't going to get either of those things from us. And they made up a bunch of stories and told a bunch of lies and a bunch of other women who I think were also to some degree lonely and isolated, believed them. And ultimately, it was and is nothing, really just jealousy. Next time on The Birth Keepers, the lost mums fight back. Emily Saldea and Yolanda Norris-Clark were both approached for comment about the issues raised in this series. Neither provided a substantive response. In reply to one email, Emily said, quote, Some of these allegations are false or defamatory. After we published the findings of our investigation, Emily posted a statement on Instagram branding our report propaganda and suggesting it contained lies. She previously criticised other media coverage for unfairly depicting her as, quote, some manipulative cult leader, and said she does not care whether women free birth but wants them to have the option to choose. Yolanda has previously said that FBS was the most ethical kind of business you can run. She has said that FBS critics fail to understand its commitment to mothers taking radical responsibility and that she should not be held responsible for a mother's choices. Yolanda has also said she has always been transparent that she's not a registered midwife. In May, FBS released a disclaimer saying its content was not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any medical condition related to pregnancy or birth. It added, for medical advice, consult your healthcare provider. You can read all our reporting on the Free Birth Society at theguardian.com. Reporting and presenting was by Shirin Kahle and Lucy Osborne. The series producers were Elizabeth Kassin and Joshua Kelly. The development and field producer was Lucy Hoff. Music, composition and sound design was by Rudy Zagadlo. The commissioning editors were Nicole Jackson and Paul Lewis. This is The Guardian.
