A year-long investigation reveals how mothers lost children after being radicalised by uplifting podcast tales of births without midwives or doctors

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.

Like so many of the businesses – and ideologies – that thrive on social media, FBS cultivates a sanitized image of the product it promotes. Saldaya never hosts podcast guests who regret their decision to freebirth. And she routinely deletes negative comments on Instagram, such as the one posted earlier this year by a mother who lost her daughter: “My baby died 41 weeks stillborn after I followed your teachings and I will regret it for the rest of my life.” (The mother was also blocked.)