The dreams of, in this and other cases, of women failed by heath care systems and lack of empathy from medical professionals and who seek radical and liberatory options reflected back to them by the wellness woo-woo, New Age alternative health sector. Just as with the supplement peddlers like Joseph Mercola, the postural yoga movement and the anti-vaccinations queens like Christine Northrup, the Free Birth Society emerge from the ether to prey on the vulnerabilities of women during the most crucial and transformative periods of their lives. But on this occasion the human misery wreaked by this multi-million enterprise in medical charlatanry has been documented to its nth degree by a Guardian investigation into 48 deaths of women that can be directly attributed to its teachings and practices.
The Free Birth Society is a North Carolina based organisation co-founded by former doulas (a doula is a non-medical professional who supports someone through a health-related experience such as childbirth, miscarriage, abortion or dying) Emilee Saldaya and Yolande Norris-Clark. It is a multi-million-dollar enterprise which according to the Guardian has earned at least $13 million since 2011. In its imagery and language, the movement leans towards mythical and spiritual symbolism. For instance, co-founder Saldaya once wore a golden crown at a gathering presenting birth as a kind of ‘liberation’ or sacred act.[1]
According to the Guardian report in November 2025, at least 48 women suffered stillbirths, neonatal deaths or whose babies were born with serious physical and developmental disabilities as a result of links to the Free Birth Society which romanticises childbirth without any sort of medical professional present and tries to convince parents-to-be that trusting nature is safer than trusting medicine. It promotes the ‘wild pregnancy’ doctrine that rejects prenatal check-ups, ultrasound scans, professional interventions, and advocates instead for unassisted childbirth.[2]
The sanctification of wild pregnancies is a key element of its core philosophy of radical responsibility – a belief system that places the burden of birth outcomes solely on the mother. The Guardian alleges that the Free Birth Society curriculum normalises serious complications. like haemorrhage, shoulder dystocia, retained placenta as merely variations of ‘natural birth.’ It reportedly counsels women to accept any outcome, even death, as part of their birth journey and to resist calling for medical help.[3]
In this perversion of women’s empowerment narratives, women who experience tragic outcomes are taught to blame themselves rather than question their guidance they received. Former members have described the isolating effects of this advice on grieving mothers. They are left to bear the grief and shame for losses that medical intervention while simultaneously protecting the organisation’s co-founders from accountability.[4]
Birth, Life And Death
As is familiar with other perhaps least lethally faddish alternative health movements, many of the Free Birth Society clients are women who have lost trust in professional maternity services and an increasingly medicalised approach to birth. Such may well have been the case for Naomi James of Dundalk who while Emilee Saldaya was hosting the Matriarch Rising festival, a celebratory gathering for FBS at her 21-hectare (52-acre) property in North Carolina where presumably she stole the show by dancing by the lake wearing a crown, bled to death while freebirthing her son. [5]
It is impossible to determine with absolute certainty whether 38-year-old James would have survived had a doctor or midwife been present or to attribute conclusively her death to FBS influence. While she appears to have been scarred by adverse experiences with maternity services, a review of her social media activity does highlight the type of content she was accessing during her pregnancy, which was considered high risk due to her two previous caesarean sections.[6]
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 Haemorrhage with Yolande Norris-Clark by her doula. It is not known if James listened to the episode which she was tagged beneath on Instagram in which Saldaya had said while she had seen “tons 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 now 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 post-partum haemorrhage after her free birth.[7]
James’s brother Adam Boyle believes his sister was “radicalised” by influencers, and there was nothing “anyone could have done” to change her mind about her birth plan.” She was convinced of her ability to, in the words of the MSM rejectionist mantra, “do her own research.”[8]
James had written in online free birth groups about having been denied her choices by medical providers in her previous pregnancies. In March 2024 she posted in a free birth Facebook group to complain that a doctor had responded to her plans for a vaginal birth after two previous C-sections with laughter. Such contemptuous and disrespectful treatment, she wrote, led her to disengage from maternity service, not turning up to many appointments and, instead, to seek information online. She hooked up to a “clubhouse,” led by the prominent UK birth influencer Kemi Johnson, a former midwife turned “birth keeper” who has deregistered from the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) and has amassed 42,000 followers on Instagram.[9]
Much like Saldaya and another UK deregistered nurse turned medical conspiracist influencer, Kate Sheramani, Johnson has a reputation for posting highly inflammatory comments on maternity services. In response to a post about mothers who freebirth being investigated by Child Protection Services (CPS), Johnson said that mothers opting to give birth in hospital should in turn be referred to CPS for “ignoring the iatrogenic [medically induced’] harm being caused to themselves and their baby”. She has insulted doctors as “knobstetricians” and alleged that the UK has “very rapey maternity services”[10]
James interacted enthusiastically with Johnson’s content on social media as well as attending Johnson’s private birth discussion. During her pregnancy, James liked 15 Instagram posts by Johnson some of which were about mothers who, like herself were rejecting medical advice and choosing to freebirth.[11]
While, as stated earlier, it is not possible to directly attribute blame for the death of Naomi James to the doctrines of the Free Birth Society, the testimony of her brother does set out a strong case for FBS culpability and also stated earlier the FBS ethos of radical responsibility give FBS a convenient get out clause which needs to be challenged legally and morally. The tragedy of Naomi James offers another poignant example of how adherence to FBS and other conspiracist movement can split families and relatives. The Naomi James case is hauntingly reminiscent of the death of Kate Sheramani’s daughter who had followed her mother’s anti-medical interventionist advice over her cancer condition and the subsequent estrangement of her two brothers from their mother.
If Naomi James was at least cognisant of FBS ethos and practices, the same cannot be said in the case of Ernesta Chirwa and her husband Chifundo Bingala of Cape Town, South Africa who lost twins after hiring what they presumed to be a licensed midwife but who turned out to be a FBS birthkeeper, one Caitlyn Collins who they had met through one of Bingala’ s friends who had vouched for her. The couple could not afford Collins’s fee but agreed to an exchange of clothing, made by Bingala, for her services.[12]
Perhaps the penny dropped when Ms Collins while driving Ernesta, then in active labour to hospital after 6am on 15 February 2022, asked her “not to mention to the nurses that we were trying to have a home birth.” When Chirwa went past her due date to 43 weeks, Collins assured the couple by text that such a late-term birth “can be normal”. After rousing the couple in the middle of the night, Collins on checking Chirwa, saw a baby’s foot protruding from her vagina which was an indication that Chirwa’s baby was footling breech – one of the most difficult types of breech to deliver – with a prolapsed cord. Unbeknownst to Chirwa also, she was carrying twins. She was thus in a serious emergency; an emergency that the hospital specialising, as it did in low-risk care, that she was being taken was ill-equipped to deal with.[13]
Before her eventual transfer to Mowbray Maternity Hospital in Cape Town where doctors and nurses could handle complex cases, Chirwa observed in horror in the ambulance the stopping of her daughter Kweli’s heartbeat. At Mowbray, staff informed her that she had been pregnant with twins, but that both of her children were now dead, her son Kwesi having died in utero the day before.[14]
In the court filings relating to their lawsuit against Collins for alleged negligence (they also reported her to Cape Town police) they alleged that she had provided “shockingly poor” medical advice and care, failed to inform them that she was not a licensed midwife and failed to disclose information about the two stillbirths in March 2020 and June 2021 linked to her and her business partner’s now defunct Circle of Elephants practice which purported to be a “midwifery practice” that provided an evidence-based “midwifery model of care”. (Collins’s lawyers have denied Circle of Elephants even purported to offer midwifery services, describing it as a traditional birthing centre staffed by “birthing assistants” – a legally weak sleight of hand if there ever was one).[15]
An expert review carried out on behalf of Chirwa and Bingala by local obstetrician Dr Linda Murray described the outcome “as a shocking case of misconduct and substandard care.” She identified multiple failings: the fact that Chirwa went to 43 weeks of pregnancy, unaware that she was carrying twins, despite the fact that experts usually recommend a planned birth for twins at between 36 and 38 weeks. The lack of prenatal care Collins provided: no recommendations for ultrasounds, no blood tests, no blood-pressure checks, no urine samples, and no measurement of her baby bump which was so big when Chirwa labour that it was off the measuring charts. In the words of a midwife who reviewed Chirwa’s medical notes, “These twins should not have died.”[16]
Before looking at the case for her defence put by her lawyers, it is instructive to delve into the backstory of Caitlyn Collins. She is a graduate of the Radical Birth Keeper school, a three-month, $6,000 course taught via Zoom. To date more than 850 women, from 30 countries around the world, have graduated as radical birth keepers. Before charting this path, Collins was a trained midwife. She passed the North American Registry of Midwives exam, which meant that she could practice in the US as a certified professional midwife but was ineligible to practice in her native South Africa, as the South African Nursing Council (SANC) refused to recognise US-trained midwives.[17]
She and her business partner then formed the afore-mentioned Circle of Elephants. At peer review meetings to learn from the two stillbirths connected to the Circle, Collins took a very defensive approach towards the proceedings telling the midwives at one meeting that she felt “fear, anger and sadness.” Her involvement with the Radical Birth Keeper school was for her an “intense but really amazing light-bulb moment” in which she realised how she had been “affected by the industrial medical model and how this compromised my own health and well-being.” Now she was working to enable women who “want to be radically responsible “for their own births.[18]
Caitlyn Collins thus deployed a rhetorical strategy that any student or observer of New Age/alternative health/anti-vaccination movements can see. She layers a patina of social or anti-establishment radicalism, in this case industrial medical complex (Big Pharma being another signifier) on top of what is basically a libertarian, anti-statist ideology which turns women’s health needs and self-empowerment on their head through the doctrine of “radical responsibility.”
So, in her defence, Caitlyn Collins’s legal team insisted that she had always presented herself as a birth keeper, not a midwife or any kind of medical provider, in order to circumvent the prohibition in many countries of practicing midwifery without a licence. “To be crystal clear, a radical birth keeper is in practice an authentic midwife,” Saldaya assured her students in 2025. Collins denied ever cautioning Chirwa not to tell hospital staff that she had been attempting a home birth and that she had told a person who she presumed was a medical orderly that Chirwa required immediate attention. The lawyers also argued that there was no contractual agreement with Chirwa and Bingala as the clothing Bingala suppled her was a gift. But the real sting in the tail was their attachment of fault to Chirwa and Bigwala rather than to Collins on the grounds of their “negligent” failure to attend professional maternity services for checkups which they argued “contributed to the death[s] of their babies.”[19]
So, under the aegis of “radical responsibility,” this Kafkaesque defence of the actions of Caitlyn Collins represents a double denial of agency to the victims of her seeming malpractice. Denied vital medical information which could have saved her babies by someone she had placed her trust in, the responsibility is then thrust back on Chirwa for not seeking professional maternity check-ups; such courses of action being expressly discouraged by the Free Birth Society.
The responses of Saldaya and her business partner, Norris-Clark to the Guardian’s investigation into the FBS, and the Chirwa case such as they were, also have a very familiar ring to them. While refusing to engage with the substance of the allegations, Saldaya did post one email saying that “Some of these allegations are false and defamatory.'' On the day of the publication of the Guardian investigation into FBS, Saldaya posted a statement on Instagram criticising “propaganda on mainstream news.” Asked about Chirwa’s tragic loss on a call with radical birth keeper students, Norris-Clark dismissed any criticism by this default broad brush statement:
James’s brother Adam Boyle believes his sister was “radicalised” by influencers, and there was nothing “anyone could have done” to change her mind about her birth plan.” She was convinced of her ability to, in the words of the MSM rejectionist mantra, “do her own research.”[8]
James had written in online free birth groups about having been denied her choices by medical providers in her previous pregnancies. In March 2024 she posted in a free birth Facebook group to complain that a doctor had responded to her plans for a vaginal birth after two previous C-sections with laughter. Such contemptuous and disrespectful treatment, she wrote, led her to disengage from maternity service, not turning up to many appointments and, instead, to seek information online. She hooked up to a “clubhouse,” led by the prominent UK birth influencer Kemi Johnson, a former midwife turned “birth keeper” who has deregistered from the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) and has amassed 42,000 followers on Instagram.[9]
Much like Saldaya and another UK deregistered nurse turned medical conspiracist influencer, Kate Sheramani, Johnson has a reputation for posting highly inflammatory comments on maternity services. In response to a post about mothers who freebirth being investigated by Child Protection Services (CPS), Johnson said that mothers opting to give birth in hospital should in turn be referred to CPS for “ignoring the iatrogenic [medically induced’] harm being caused to themselves and their baby”. She has insulted doctors as “knobstetricians” and alleged that the UK has “very rapey maternity services”[10]
James interacted enthusiastically with Johnson’s content on social media as well as attending Johnson’s private birth discussion. During her pregnancy, James liked 15 Instagram posts by Johnson some of which were about mothers who, like herself were rejecting medical advice and choosing to freebirth.[11]
While, as stated earlier, it is not possible to directly attribute blame for the death of Naomi James to the doctrines of the Free Birth Society, the testimony of her brother does set out a strong case for FBS culpability and also stated earlier the FBS ethos of radical responsibility give FBS a convenient get out clause which needs to be challenged legally and morally. The tragedy of Naomi James offers another poignant example of how adherence to FBS and other conspiracist movement can split families and relatives. The Naomi James case is hauntingly reminiscent of the death of Kate Sheramani’s daughter who had followed her mother’s anti-medical interventionist advice over her cancer condition and the subsequent estrangement of her two brothers from their mother.
If Naomi James was at least cognisant of FBS ethos and practices, the same cannot be said in the case of Ernesta Chirwa and her husband Chifundo Bingala of Cape Town, South Africa who lost twins after hiring what they presumed to be a licensed midwife but who turned out to be a FBS birthkeeper, one Caitlyn Collins who they had met through one of Bingala’ s friends who had vouched for her. The couple could not afford Collins’s fee but agreed to an exchange of clothing, made by Bingala, for her services.[12]
Perhaps the penny dropped when Ms Collins while driving Ernesta, then in active labour to hospital after 6am on 15 February 2022, asked her “not to mention to the nurses that we were trying to have a home birth.” When Chirwa went past her due date to 43 weeks, Collins assured the couple by text that such a late-term birth “can be normal”. After rousing the couple in the middle of the night, Collins on checking Chirwa, saw a baby’s foot protruding from her vagina which was an indication that Chirwa’s baby was footling breech – one of the most difficult types of breech to deliver – with a prolapsed cord. Unbeknownst to Chirwa also, she was carrying twins. She was thus in a serious emergency; an emergency that the hospital specialising, as it did in low-risk care, that she was being taken was ill-equipped to deal with.[13]
Before her eventual transfer to Mowbray Maternity Hospital in Cape Town where doctors and nurses could handle complex cases, Chirwa observed in horror in the ambulance the stopping of her daughter Kweli’s heartbeat. At Mowbray, staff informed her that she had been pregnant with twins, but that both of her children were now dead, her son Kwesi having died in utero the day before.[14]
In the court filings relating to their lawsuit against Collins for alleged negligence (they also reported her to Cape Town police) they alleged that she had provided “shockingly poor” medical advice and care, failed to inform them that she was not a licensed midwife and failed to disclose information about the two stillbirths in March 2020 and June 2021 linked to her and her business partner’s now defunct Circle of Elephants practice which purported to be a “midwifery practice” that provided an evidence-based “midwifery model of care”. (Collins’s lawyers have denied Circle of Elephants even purported to offer midwifery services, describing it as a traditional birthing centre staffed by “birthing assistants” – a legally weak sleight of hand if there ever was one).[15]
An expert review carried out on behalf of Chirwa and Bingala by local obstetrician Dr Linda Murray described the outcome “as a shocking case of misconduct and substandard care.” She identified multiple failings: the fact that Chirwa went to 43 weeks of pregnancy, unaware that she was carrying twins, despite the fact that experts usually recommend a planned birth for twins at between 36 and 38 weeks. The lack of prenatal care Collins provided: no recommendations for ultrasounds, no blood tests, no blood-pressure checks, no urine samples, and no measurement of her baby bump which was so big when Chirwa labour that it was off the measuring charts. In the words of a midwife who reviewed Chirwa’s medical notes, “These twins should not have died.”[16]
Before looking at the case for her defence put by her lawyers, it is instructive to delve into the backstory of Caitlyn Collins. She is a graduate of the Radical Birth Keeper school, a three-month, $6,000 course taught via Zoom. To date more than 850 women, from 30 countries around the world, have graduated as radical birth keepers. Before charting this path, Collins was a trained midwife. She passed the North American Registry of Midwives exam, which meant that she could practice in the US as a certified professional midwife but was ineligible to practice in her native South Africa, as the South African Nursing Council (SANC) refused to recognise US-trained midwives.[17]
She and her business partner then formed the afore-mentioned Circle of Elephants. At peer review meetings to learn from the two stillbirths connected to the Circle, Collins took a very defensive approach towards the proceedings telling the midwives at one meeting that she felt “fear, anger and sadness.” Her involvement with the Radical Birth Keeper school was for her an “intense but really amazing light-bulb moment” in which she realised how she had been “affected by the industrial medical model and how this compromised my own health and well-being.” Now she was working to enable women who “want to be radically responsible “for their own births.[18]
Caitlyn Collins thus deployed a rhetorical strategy that any student or observer of New Age/alternative health/anti-vaccination movements can see. She layers a patina of social or anti-establishment radicalism, in this case industrial medical complex (Big Pharma being another signifier) on top of what is basically a libertarian, anti-statist ideology which turns women’s health needs and self-empowerment on their head through the doctrine of “radical responsibility.”
So, in her defence, Caitlyn Collins’s legal team insisted that she had always presented herself as a birth keeper, not a midwife or any kind of medical provider, in order to circumvent the prohibition in many countries of practicing midwifery without a licence. “To be crystal clear, a radical birth keeper is in practice an authentic midwife,” Saldaya assured her students in 2025. Collins denied ever cautioning Chirwa not to tell hospital staff that she had been attempting a home birth and that she had told a person who she presumed was a medical orderly that Chirwa required immediate attention. The lawyers also argued that there was no contractual agreement with Chirwa and Bingala as the clothing Bingala suppled her was a gift. But the real sting in the tail was their attachment of fault to Chirwa and Bigwala rather than to Collins on the grounds of their “negligent” failure to attend professional maternity services for checkups which they argued “contributed to the death[s] of their babies.”[19]
So, under the aegis of “radical responsibility,” this Kafkaesque defence of the actions of Caitlyn Collins represents a double denial of agency to the victims of her seeming malpractice. Denied vital medical information which could have saved her babies by someone she had placed her trust in, the responsibility is then thrust back on Chirwa for not seeking professional maternity check-ups; such courses of action being expressly discouraged by the Free Birth Society.
The responses of Saldaya and her business partner, Norris-Clark to the Guardian’s investigation into the FBS, and the Chirwa case such as they were, also have a very familiar ring to them. While refusing to engage with the substance of the allegations, Saldaya did post one email saying that “Some of these allegations are false and defamatory.'' On the day of the publication of the Guardian investigation into FBS, Saldaya posted a statement on Instagram criticising “propaganda on mainstream news.” Asked about Chirwa’s tragic loss on a call with radical birth keeper students, Norris-Clark dismissed any criticism by this default broad brush statement:
Any mainstream press organisation, all of which are owned by the medical-industrial complex, will find whatever way they can to frame an independent birth keeper.[20]
The typical last refuge of the conspiracist and charlatan. Everything forms part of an ever revolving, seen and unseen global conspiracy by the Deep State; MSM; Big Pharma; whatever industrial complex – fill in the gaps if you wish. The Free Birth Society is yet another example of the exploitation of those, particularly women, whose adverse experiences of health service delivery and deception by large pharmaceutical or other corporations leave them vulnerable to the utopian promises; the reflection of dreams back to the dreamer that are the calling cards of the typical charlatan and to the grift of those who monetise these dreams while leaving behind and denying responsibility for the resultant debris of broken dreams, financial debris and, in the case of the FBS, devastating personal loss and even death. Would that the Guardian investigation into this pernicious network may lead to such roads being less travelled.
References
[1] Nitya Thirumidai, What is the Free Birth Society? Wild Pregnancy Influencers Accused of Newborn Deaths. News 18. 25 November 2025.
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] Sirim Kale & Lucy Osborne, ‘Free birth.’ Radical influencers in spotlight after death of a mother. Guardian 4 December 2025 pp.16-17
[6] Ibid, p.16
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid, p.17
[10] Ibid
[11] Ibid
[12] Sarah Kale and Lucy Osborne, ‘Those twins should not have died.’ The Guardian, G2 9 December 2025 pp.4-5
[13] Ibid, p.4
[14] Ibid
[15] Ibid
[16] Ibid
[17] Ibid
[1] Nitya Thirumidai, What is the Free Birth Society? Wild Pregnancy Influencers Accused of Newborn Deaths. News 18. 25 November 2025.
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] Sirim Kale & Lucy Osborne, ‘Free birth.’ Radical influencers in spotlight after death of a mother. Guardian 4 December 2025 pp.16-17
[6] Ibid, p.16
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid, p.17
[10] Ibid
[11] Ibid
[12] Sarah Kale and Lucy Osborne, ‘Those twins should not have died.’ The Guardian, G2 9 December 2025 pp.4-5
[13] Ibid, p.4
[14] Ibid
[15] Ibid
[16] Ibid
[17] Ibid
[18] Ibid
[19] Ibid
[20] Ibid
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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