\n<\/p>\n
W<\/span>hen the holistic practitioner Emma Cardinal, 32, became pregnant in May 2023, she planned to have a home birth with midwives. Cardinal lives in a town in British Columbia with strong counter-cultural roots. \u201cThe community that I live in, home birth is something a lot of women prioritise,\u201d she explains.<\/p>\n Then Cardinal stumbled across a podcast from the Free Birth Society (FBS). One episode in particular, she says, made an impact: \u201cUnpacking Ultrasound With Yolande Clark.\u201d In it, the Canadian ex-doula Yolande Norris-Clark falsely links ultrasounds to autism and ADHD and states that \u201cultrasound damages and modifies and destroys cells\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/span>Yolande Norris-Clark in an episode of The Complete Guide to Freebirth.<\/span> Photograph: FBS<\/p>\n Norris-Clark, who was born in Vancouver, is arguably the most famous freebirth influencer in the world. She is also a key figure in FBS, a US company run by her business partner and fellow ex-doula Emilee Saldaya.<\/p>\n FBS, which promotes an extreme version of free birth in which women abandon any form of prenatal care and give birth without doctors or midwives present, is estimated to have generated more than $13m in revenues since 2018. A recent Guardian investigation identified 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.<\/p>\n The intellectual heft behind FBS, Norris-Clark shaped the organisation\u2019s radical position on birth, while Saldaya, its founder, runs the business. Most women find FBS through its Instagram account, which has 132,000 followers, or podcast, which has been downloaded 5m times.<\/p>\n But Norris-Clark is a significant social media influencer in her own right, pioneering a radical version of free birth that concerns even pro-freebirth advocates.<\/p>\n <\/span>Emma Cardinal: \u2018You can\u2019t just post about the good side of free birth. What happens when it goes very wrong?\u2019<\/span> Photograph: Annika Faith<\/p>\n After listening to the podcast about ultrasounds, Cardinal was alarmed. \u201cI was petrified of miscarriage and stillbirth,\u201d she says, explaining that her younger brother was stillborn. \u201cThere\u2019s not a chance I\u2019m risking that.\u201d Cardinal came to believe ultrasounds \u201caren\u2019t super safe for the baby\u201d.<\/p>\n At that stage, Cardinal had not yet decided to freebirth. She phoned a local midwifery practice and explained that she wanted a home birth, but did not want to have any ultrasounds during her pregnancy. But the receptionist, Cardinal recalls, said that if she wanted to give birth with them, ultrasounds were non-negotiable. Cardinal thought about it, and decided she was not comfortable proceeding.<\/p>\n Instead, after listening to about 100 episodes of the FBS podcast, Cardinal decided to freebirth. In one journal entry, she wrote: \u201cI know it in my bones that freebirthing is my safest and most liberated option.\u201d She purchased FBS\u2019s popular video course, \u201cThe Complete Guide to Freebirth\u201d.<\/p>\n Cardinal\u2019s son Floyd was stillborn in March 2024. During labour Cardinal saw meconium in her waters, a possible sign of distress, but dismissed it because \u201cI was told by FBS that meconium is totally normal\u201d. She stayed home for three days, because \u201cI remember hearing Emilee Saldaya\u2019s voice in my head [from the podcasts], saying: \u2018I wouldn\u2019t be concerned for the first three days.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n After Floyd died, Cardinal was hospitalised with sepsis and placed in an induced coma. She has had a number of surgeries to repair the damage from his birth, and had to wear an ostomy bag for a time. \u201cI didn\u2019t think that could even be a reality that could happen after birth,\u201d she says. \u201cI almost had to have a hysterectomy.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Emma Cardinal in hospital after the stillbirth of Floyd.<\/span> Photograph: Annika Faith<\/p>\n Looking back, Cardinal believes that much of the information she received from FBS was \u201cincomplete, biased, one-sided and kind of dogmatic\u201d. This includes the information she received on ultrasounds, which are not harmful to unborn babies when used appropriately. She adds: \u201cYou can\u2019t just post about the good side of free birth. What happens when it goes very wrong?\u201d<\/p>\n Norris-Clark has not responded to repeated requests for comment about the Guardian\u2019s investigation, which is told through The Birth Keepers podcast series. She has previously defended her partnership with Saldaya, saying FBS is \u201cthe most ethical kind of business you can run\u201d. Critics of FBS, she has said, fail to understand the commitment to women taking \u201cradical responsibility\u201d for their births. And she has said it is unfair to hold her responsible for the choices of a mother who consumes her content.<\/p>\n However the spotlight on tragedies involving mothers around the world who consumed FBS content is posing a crisis for the business.<\/p>\n Saldaya has also not provided a substantive response to requests for comment, but told the Guardian in one email that \u201csome of these allegations are false or defamatory\u201d. She has previously responded to criticism by saying she does not care if women freebirth, but wants them to have the choice. In recent comments to her followers, she described the Guardian\u2019s reporting as \u201cpropaganda\u201d based on \u201clies\u201d, and suggested her work, words and character had been misrepresented by \u201ctwisted, dark attacks\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/span>Emilee Saldaya pictured in a screengrab of the Free Birth Society website.<\/span> Composite: FBS<\/p>\n Cardinal is not the only Canadian woman to lose their child after an FBS-influenced free birth. Although Canada has universal healthcare, it is a sparsely populated country, with large \u201cmidwifery deserts\u201d. Alternative communities can be sceptical of licensed professionals. As in other parts of the world, FBS messaging often resonates with women who have had traumatic experiences of maternity services or unnecessary medical interventions.<\/strong> The Covid pandemic also eroded many women\u2019s trust in the medical establishment.<\/p>\n Not all of the women who want to avoid licensed providers are ready to freebirth. Some turn to unlicensed attendants, believing they offer their best chance to avoid hospital for their birth. Canada has a community of unlicensed birth attendants, in part due to the historic status of midwifery in the nation. Unlike other countries with strong cultures of midwifery, such as the Netherlands and Denmark, Canada has lagged behind other developed nations when it comes to recognising midwifery. Midwives and their clients can sometimes encounter scepticism, or even hostility, from healthcare professionals.<\/p>\n It is in this context that women turn to unlicensed attendants, some of whom, while unregulated, are skilled and experienced underground midwives. But others \u2013 such as those who enrolled only in a brief online FBS course \u2013 have limited or no experience of births, and no adequate skills for managing potential emergencies.<\/p>\n The most popular of FBS\u2019s schools, the Radical Birthkeeper School, has trained 850 \u201cauthentic midwives\u201d from more than 30 countries. On its three-month Zoom course, only about half the content deals with birth, and the rest focuses on self-development and business skills. There are at least 22 FBS-accredited birth keepers in Canada, according to an online directory seen by the Guardian.<\/p>\n FBS advises its radical birth keepers \u2013 or RBKs \u2013 to get out in the world and begin attending births. \u201cThe very best way to learn how to do midwifery is by doing midwifery,\u201d Saldaya told her RBK students in 2025. Many have since set up their own businesses supporting women during their free births.<\/p>\n Alexandra Smith, 29, a life coach who hired an FBS-trained RBK for her birth, is from Vancouver Island. \u201cIt\u2019s a different way of thinking out here. People prefer to be off grid,\u201d Smith explains. \u201cIt\u2019s a holistic space, with lots of hippies, everyone is about free birth and Waldorf education.\u201d Norris-Clark, she adds, is \u201cvery popular where I live\u201d.<\/p>\n She says women in her area see Norris-Clark as the \u201cfounding mother\u201d of free birth, who has \u201cbrought a solution to systemic problems\u201d in Canada.<\/p>\n During her pregnancy, Smith says, she listened to the FBS podcast regularly, sometimes multiple episodes a day, and that she found Norris-Clark particularly captivating. Were it not for FBS, she says, she would have had a home birth with a midwife.<\/p>\n <\/span>Alexandra Smith with a painting of her son Aksel.<\/span> Photograph: Odessa Rae<\/p>\n Many of the women who follow Norris-Clark on social media, seeking advice in their pregnancies, are unaware of her more extreme views, which she sometimes revealed to FBS students. \u201cI actually don\u2019t believe that gravity is true,\u201d she told FBS students in 2024, adding: \u201cMaybe that just makes me crazy and that\u2019s totally OK.\u201d In another class, she told students they could cut a baby\u2019s umbilical cord with an \u201cold rusty fork\u201d. \u201cI don\u2019t believe in germ theory,\u201d she said, \u201cI don\u2019t believe in contagion,\u201d adding: \u201cBut even if contagion were real \u2026 there would be a pretty much 0% chance of anything happening.\u201d<\/p>\n Such radical beliefs are not part of FBS\u2019s slick advertising and promotional materials. Smith says she believed, based on FBS marketing, that RBKs were \u201ctrained, unregistered midwives\u201d. \u201cI feel like I was falsely advertised to,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n (Others have made similar complaints about FBS. Earlier this year a lawyer for FBS responded to a consumer protection complaint filed in North Carolina alleging a course was mis-sold by stating that the company had always been transparent that it was offering \u201cpersonal development and sovereign-birth related education\u201d rather than certified midwifery training.)<\/p>\n The RBK who Smith hired to attend her during her free birth was in her mid-20s. In a video testimonial she filmed for the RBK school, which had been available online until recently, she said the school \u201cwasn\u2019t your typical school in that it provides hard facts, information, data, and all of that stuff. It was different in that what I gained from the experience was this deep trust in birth, the deep sense of knowing that birth unfolds beautifully if we just step out of the way.\u201d<\/p>\n When it came to the birth, Smith alleges her RBK was woefully underprepared and \u201clike a deer in headlights\u201d. The RBK, Smith says, missed signs her labour was unfolding abnormally. When Smith\u2019s son Aksel was born on 7 May 2023, his umbilical cord was white, and he was floppy and unresponsive. The RBK, she says, did not attempt to resuscitate the baby, and Smith had to tell her to call 911. Aksel was rushed to hospital, and diagnosed with severe hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy due to oxygen deprivation caused by a placental abruption at his birth. The RBK has not responded to requests for comment.<\/p>\n As unlicensed attendants, including those trained by FBS, proliferate across Canada, the authorities are seeking to clamp down on the practice.<\/p>\n On Vancouver Island, Canada\u2019s most famous unlicensed birth attendant, Gloria Lemay, 78, is awaiting trial for manslaughter after a girl died 10 days after her birth, which Lemay attended, in January 2024. It is her latest legal battle in a near five-decade long career.<\/p>\n In 1986, Lemay was convicted of criminal negligence causing death after a baby was born dead at a birth she attended, although she was later acquitted, with the supreme court upholding a lower court\u2019s judgment that a child that is not yet born cannot be considered a person. Four years later, after a baby boy died of an infection three days after a birth attended by Lemay, she was fined $1,000 for refusing to answer questions at the inquest. In 2002, Lemay was found in contempt of an order prohibiting her from acting as a midwife. She was arrested in relation to the most recent case in January 2025. A case management conference is scheduled for January 2026. Lemay declined to comment on her upcoming trial, but it is understood she plans to contest the charges and plead not guilty.<\/p>\n <\/span>Gloria Lemay trained Yolande Norris-Clark as a doula.<\/span> Photograph: Facebook<\/p>\n Norris-Clark always credits Lemay with inspiring her lifelong passion for birth. Lemay attended Norris-Clark\u2019s first two births, and trained her as a doula. However those familiar with both women\u2019s careers say Norris-Clark\u2019s views on birth are more extreme than those of her one-time mentor.<\/p>\n Lemay remains a highly divisive figure. Viewed by some in the medical establishment as a dangerous charlatan, she is equally beloved by many in the birth world, who regard her as a folk hero comparable to the legendary US midwife Ina May Gaskin. The Birth Care Alliance, a campaign to counter what it says is the \u201csystemic overreach into birth sovereignty and midwifery\u201d, is fundraising for her defence. (So too is Norris-Clark, who has described Lemay\u2019s trial as \u201cthe attempted martyrdom of a cherished elder\u201d.)<\/p>\n Lemay\u2019s supporters say she wished to retire years ago, but was repeatedly asked to attend births by women who wanted to give birth outside the system. They say she is highly skilled, supports medical transfer when necessary, and has attended thousands of births in her career, of which only very few ended in tragedy. To her detractors, Lemay is a thorn in the side of the medical establishment, and the authorities have repeatedly targeted her.<\/p>\n But Canadian health authorities are also warning about less famous, and considerably less skilled, attendants, some of whom are FBS-affiliated.<\/p>\n In 2023 the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives put out an advisory notice warning the public about the RBK hired by Smith, saying she was not entitled to practise as a midwife, and that she could be offering midwifery services without being permitted to do so. (The Guardian has seen no evidence that she continued to attend births after Smith\u2019s in May 2023.)<\/p>\n The following year, a different FBS-linked birth attendant was banned from hospitals across Alberta unless she was seeking medical care for herself or her family. The woman, who marketed herself as a \u201ctraditional midwife\u201d, had been a member of the FBS membership community and appeared as a guest on its podcast. A number of complaints were filed against her by concerned staff at two Calgary hospitals after she was linked to two stillbirths in 2021. (Her lawyer told the Guardian that her birth services have been limited to non-medical support.)<\/p>\n Smith\u2019s son Aksel spent five weeks in hospital before being discharged in June 2023. Deprived of oxygen during birth, he had severe disabilities and was fed through a tube. Smith was his full-time carer. \u201cYou\u2019re just trying to wrap your head around what happened,\u201d she recalls of that time, \u201cand my mental state was: how do we find a cure, how do we fix this?\u201d<\/p>\n She goes on: \u201cIt\u2019s very lonely having a medically complex child in a holistic community. When things go awry, it\u2019s like it\u2019s your fault.\u201d<\/p>\n Aksel lived for six and a half months, before he died. \u201cIn my grief,\u201d says Smith, \u201cit\u2019s hard to think about how things could have been different.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When the holistic practitioner Emma Cardinal, 32, became pregnant in May 2023, she planned to have a home birth with midwives. Cardinal lives in a town in British Columbia with strong counter-cultural roots. \u201cThe community that I live in, home birth is something a lot of women prioritise,\u201d she explains. Then Cardinal stumbled across a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[20990,318,20987,20988,1562,916,20989],"class_list":{"0":"post-38248","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-birthkeepers","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-deer","11":"tag-headlights","12":"tag-hold","13":"tag-radical","14":"tag-unskilled"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38248\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/38249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u2018I actually don\u2019t believe gravity is true\u2019<\/h2>\n
Legal cases and public warnings<\/h2>\n