The Birth Keepers: FBS goes global – episode five

This is The Guardian. Hi, I'm Shewing Kahler, and I'm Lucy Osborne. You're listening to The Birth Peoples, a new six-part series from The Guardian Investidates. 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. Shewden 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. Traveling around the United States. It's just so far, this isn't it? It's just agricultural equipment. Yeah, just trying to be down this dirt track now. We wanted to find out how many people have been influenced by FBS. I just, every time you get that message of somebody, like Osborne saying, "Oh, there's been another stillbirth." You just have this feeling of, like, fear? Like, I've never thought anything like it. And what was the scale of the possible harm? There's just this absolute trail of destruction. We knocked on this door, and once it opened, there was no way of shutting it. But soon we realized it wasn't just America. Yeah, Ernie's neighborhood. It's in the southern suburbs of Cape Town, in South Africa. Hi, can you speak English and French? Yeah, right. That's perfect. We can do both. Emily and Yolanda had grown in ideology and ceded 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. Here's our family in the brothel. And then, I'm in Ireland. I'm from Serbia. I'm in Rotat, Uruguay. I'm in Cape Town, England. I reach we could never have fathomed when we started reporting this story. From the Guardian Investigates, I'm Lucy Osborne. I'm shewing Carla. This is The Birth Keepers. Episode five, FBS goes global. Emily, she's always on her phone. We need that early in our reporting. That's understandable for a successful influencer. But then Lucy, our serendipity, something, and her answer really poor our attention. How often was Emily directly speaking to women during their labors that you were aware of? From my perception every day. They act actually during their labors. Women were not necessarily always on the phone, but women were constantly texting her. Labor's starting. This is where I'm at in labor. This is what I'm-- And yeah, 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 why she was sending women don't go to hospital? I've never heard her tell somebody directly not to go to the hospital, but when we're all over at her house and somebody's texting her in labor, 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 all like, no, she doesn't need to go to the hospital for that. This was shocking, but is it suggest that the Emily never stopped offering women advice during their labor, even after the death of Laurence Baby Journey Moon, who you heard about in episode three? Hey, I just spoke to you. It's really sad. I thought it was a dieting. Emily was advising-- joined the birth. It was, like, my day labor, heavy maternity, and baby was breached, and who, like, a journey through FGS pulled Emily apparently. Hey, thanks for the update. 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 FBS influence, finding more more cases, they seemed to fit into different patterns. The image that comes to mind is a stone being thrown into a pond. It pulls of influence spreading out from FBS at the center. And the first ripple, the closest to them, is Emily on her phone, texting women in labor. [MUSIC PLAYING] I was just thinking, like, just feeling like I just wanted to be over, you know? Then the thoughts are 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 Haley Bordeaux. We're not going to give you a play-by-play of Haley's Labor. 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 tour with Haley, Haley's friend, and Haley's husband, Stephen. We were probably, like, about to go to the hospital. And I remember Emily saying, like, the hospital has nothing for you. That's what she said. The hospital has nothing for you. Yeah. Like, they would just make things worse. Like, you don't want to go there. That's Haley's husband, Stephen. You know, Haley was telling Emily the pain is unbearable. And she just said, oh, 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 Haley and Stephen again. Yeah, 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 ranting. 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 key. Late in the evening of the 27th of January, five days after her water's broke, Haley went blind. They raced to hospital. Haley's son was born safely by sea section. But Haley didn't see him. Found out that I had had, like, four or five strokes during the labor. 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 was like, my face is just, like, total blank, like, I don't know if my vision, like, was back at that point or not. But like, I look like dead inside. Haley's friend texted Emily. She said that doctors diagnosed Haley'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/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 labeled pre-clamptic. 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 labors, 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 Gabi 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. I felt like the 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 Gabi's birth. It might sound like a serene scene, and in many ways, it was. That's because no one in the room realised that what was unfolding was actually a life-threatening situation. It's been so good, really. When Gabi'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 distocer, 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. Oh, they're breathing. Are you okay? Are you okay? Perfect. But somewhere, deep inside her, was Gabi's intuition. I guess deep down I knew that he was stuck. That something was wrong. I said something like, can you return? Like, 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 Gabi's FBS friends who was with her during the labor. It really felt we entered some sort of time warp. Did you baby? That's it. Yeah, I was so close, Gabi. I have to shoulders out please. 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 Esau 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 I can feel the cord. That is perfect. Perfect. But minutes later, Gabi's maternal instinct kicked in and overrode her FBS education. Gabi 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 pediatric 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. Gabi 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. You think you're joining a great movement? And I was just so captivated 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 Gabi is not the only one who used that word. Former FBS members often use this kind of language to describe the whole they feel the organization had over them. After leaving FBS, Gabi 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 you and I continue our investigation, we started hearing this phrase, "The Lost Months". 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 seem to be hiding themselves from the world. But slowly, women started to open up. So I spoke to someone called, just like, you know, I've just spoken to another lost mom. She's lost two babies during free births. It's just, she had her daughter in 2022. She was heavily influenced by FBS, just another really sad woman. She lost her daughter in 2025. Hey, I just spoke to another woman called a (bleep) who also had her 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 raised it 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 that video play in my mind and my daughter began to change and I ended up distress. It's a really sad story, this one really sticks with me, actually." It's all to the last way in our 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, (bleep) how much more of the, 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 have been trained by FBS in courses, including RBK, the Radical Birth People 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. Ernesto Chiawa, Ernie, lives in Cape Town, South Africa. Ernie and her husband Chifindo were introduced to a woman called Katelyn Collins through a friend. That was in 2021, the same year Katelyn graduated from the Radical Birth People School. How did Katelyn introduce herself to you? What did you understand of Katelyn's job? She enjoyed Joseph Siftoomi as a midwife. That's how Ernie and Chifindo remember that meeting. This is their account of what happened next. Katelyn, 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 Chifindo's account of events. Would come to Katelyn's version after. Ernie, he was a cleaner at the time, could not afford what she said was Katelyn's fee. But, as her husband was a tailor, Ernie said that Katelyn agreed to accept clothing instead of cash. During your prenatal care with Katelyn, did she ever take your blood pressure? And now she never took any blood pressure. Did she ever measure the size of your bump? No, she didn't. Did she ever take your example? 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 and to midwives? What did you think you were in safe hands? I just thought I was in safe hands, 'cause it was my first pregnancy. So I wasn't quite aware of what happened. So you trusted her? I fully trusted her. 'Cause I've made 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 ultra-sunstory in her pregnancy, she would have learned that she was pregnant with twins. Experts, I commend a planned birth for twins at 36 or 37 weeks. Instead, Ernie went to 43 leaps of pregnancy. She finned a text at Katelyn to check if it was normal to go past Ernie's due date. Katelyn replied, "Can we normal?" Those dates were 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 labor. Katelyn arrived to her house just after midnight. Instead of examining her, Katelyn turned off all the lights. She switched off the lights also on the living room. Then my husband asked her, "Is it okay to switch off the lights?" Then she was like, "Yeah, actually, it helps a woman in labor to keep cool." Then Ernie says, "Katelyn fell asleep." All of a sudden, she fell asleep on the couch. At about 2 a.m., Ernie says, she and her husband Chaffando wrote up Taelin who briefly checked her before they were back to sleep. All of a sudden, again, Katelyn fell asleep on the bed. Well, I was lying on the floor. I kept on waiting while she was asleep there. And I was getting so tired. You don't have a tissue. Let's find this one. Then, around 5 a.m., they woke up Taelin again. Taelin 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 Katelyn 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 a friend 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, Katelyn? Any kind of move, can you drive us inside?" So she said, "Okay." Then, she drove us inside. Then she just left. Katelyn 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 Katelyn's heartbeat had stopped. By 13, my baby daughter was born at that time. Then, they said, "I'm sorry, Ernie. It's your daughter, but she's still born." Then, I had 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 our son, Quessie, had died in utero, that day or so before. I'm into the room, into the world, and everyone is holding their babies, and I'm the only person there. I just feel so empty. Ernie would later learn that Katelyn had a reputation amongst the medical community in Cape Town. Although Katelyn 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. Katelyn was told by the local health authority to stop practicing until she registered. But Katelyn didn't tell Ernie. She kept her as a client. Later, Ernie and Chifando sued Katelyn for alleged negligent care. They also reported her to the police in Cape Town. The police have not responded to repeated requests for comments. Katelyn also declined to comment, but in her defense in the ongoing lawsuit, she said that she unequivocally told Ernie and Chifando that she was a birth-keeper, and that she should 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 Chifando made her was a gift. Katelyn's lawyers claimed she advised the couple to register with health professionals. And it was Ernie and Chifando's negligence, they said, that contributed to the death of the twins. [MUSIC] In June this year, Katelyn made a special appearance at FPS's Matriarch Rising Festival. Katelyn had a dance workshop, and DJed under the name DJ Kunde, playing tribal themed dance music. [MUSIC] Standing next to her was Emily Saldaya. [MUSIC] 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. [MUSIC] 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 FPS. In 18 of these cases, evidence suggests that FPS played a significant role in decision making that led to potentially avoidable tragedies. [MUSIC] 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 FPS. Remember the backlash that began on Reddit that we mentioned at the end of the last episode? It was called the Free Burst 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 butter women banded together and created as you fed 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 believe them. And ultimately, it was and is nothing, really just jealousy. Next time on the birth keepers, the lost mums fight back. Emily Saldaya 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, "The FBS was the most ethical kind of business you can run." She has said that FBS critics failed to understand its commitment to mother's taking radical responsibility and that she should not be held responsible for her 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, "You're or prevent any medical condition related to pregnancy or birth." Added, "For medical advice, consult your health provider." You can read all our reporting on the free birth society at TheGuardian.com. Reporting and presenting was by Sharon Carle and Lucy Osborne. The series producers were Elizabeth Cassin and Joshua Kelly. The development of field producer was Lucy Hoff. Music composition and sound design was by Rudy Tegadelo. The commissioning editors were Nicole Jackson and Paul Lewis. Music This is The Guardian.