Lopez had met her three friends through the Free Birth Society (FBS), a business that promotes freebirth. Unlike home birth – birth at home with a midwife in attendance – freebirth means giving birth without any medical support. FBS promotes a version widely seen as extreme, even among freebirth advocates: it is anti-ultrasound, which it falsely claims harms babies, downplays serious medical conditions and promotes wild pregnancy, meaning pregnancy without any prenatal care.
FBS was founded by ex-doula Emilee Saldaya, and most women find it through its podcast, which has been downloaded 5m times, its Instagram account, which has 132,000 followers, its YouTube, with nearly 25m views, or its bestselling The Complete Guide to Freebirth, a video course co-created by Saldaya with fellow ex-doula Yolande Norris-Clark, available for download from FBS’s slick website. Analysis of FBS’s financial records by Stacey Ferris, a forensic accountant and academic at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, suggests it has generated revenues exceeding $13m since 2018.
Having a baby costs 20k in the US. If you want people to stop going to these charlatans you have to make the safe options better than indentured servitude to loan companies
I really hope history remembers the term “influencer” the same as we remember the term “plague”.
Always trust the medical opinion of an unlicensed professional promoter. Also everything you read on the internet is true
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but China got it right with only allowing influencers with qualifications on area of their expertise to make such opinions.
Also everything you read on the internet is true
Only if support pre existing beliefs
I have a feeling this is happening with a lot of things.
A lot of homeschooled kids won’t be educated at all, for example.
Yeah, without a strong educational platform it’s very difficult for someone to separate good information from bad. Public schools in a lot of countries aren’t much better.
Darwin in practice?
You mean natural selection? This isn’t a good example since environmental pressures aren’t selecting traits. The lack of education and affordable health care combined with predatory algorithms have fomented a space for misinformation to flourish. And babies have died.
If you’re going to make a terrible joke you can at least try to be accurate.
Who is to blame here? The people listening to these idiot are. They they did not listen the village idiot would have no platform.
Natural Selection at work.
That’s not very cool. Babies died. People lost their babies.
I can only agree.
