The Birth Keepers: Growing an empire – episode four

This is The Guardian. Hi, I'm Shewing Kahler, and I'm Lucy Osborne. You're listening to The Birth Peoples, and we use six-part series from The Guardian Investidates. Just before we start, this series contains references to Babyloss and Maternal Harm. I have a very exciting announcement to make. The official Free Burst Society Membership Network is now live. We have abandoned mainstream social media and created our own private network, a truly safe space where women can be free to talk about pregnancy, birth, holistic mothering. Within months of the death of Laurence Baby Journey Moon and the public backlash adents the Free Birth Society that followed. Emily Saldair took the membership private. We are so proud of this new space and we can't wait to welcome you. Come join us in the fun. Although it was sparked by a terrible tragedy, years later, Emily would tell friends that taping the membership behind a paywall actually strengthened the business, because it meant that she could now collect fees. This is the story of how the Free Birth Society became a global, multi-million dollar business empire, and how some claim that the relentless pursuit of profit led to a trail of harm across the world, one that bore Emily and Yolanda to the brink. From the Guardian Investigates, I'm Showing Kale, and this is the Birth Peepers. Episode 4. Growing an Empire. I was just like, holy crap, this woman is amazing, you know, like, wow. Seventeepity Day, like many other women, was drawn to the Free Birth Society by the podcast, and in particular by Emily Saldair. You'll remember Seventeepity from Episode 1. She was showing us one of Emily's gold crowns when we visited her at her home in Omaha, Nebraska. Back in 2020, when she first discovered Emily, Seventeepity was a douler, providing women with emotional, not medical support, during their births. So when she heard about the FBS private membership filling up with hundreds of newly pregnant women, she thought, hey, maybe this could be an opportunity for me. Initially, one of my main motivations was to find clients. By now, Emily was personally interviewing new FBS applicants. After the interview, like, our 40-minute conversation, I was just like, I was in love. I was just like, I can tell I just did something big, you know, like, I can feel the energy of like, this is gonna change my life. FBS had grown into a multi-platform business. As well as the private membership, currently priced at $499. There was the flagship video course, the complete guide to Free Birth. Now, priced at $399. And Emily and Yolanda had also started to branch out into other revenue streams. We've had a lot of growth in creation going on over here at Free Birth Society. With launching two more courses this fall, our first ever members retreat, organizing our incredible mother's retreat in Dominican Republic this winter, and our soon-to-be-out magazine. Celebrating the. One-on-one coaching sessions for members now priced at $350 an hour. Or Yolanda's course, through the rail, where students start to watch her actual birth. Through the veil also includes the hour-plus-long documentary of my eighth baby's birth, an incredibly loving, incredibly vulnerable, gritty, agonizing, naked, and beautiful family birth. And then, just the serendipity was joined in FBS. My fellow Americans, tonight I want to speak with you about our nations unprecedented response to the coronavirus outbreak. Governments began to enforce lockdowns and masked mandates. Emily and Yolanda were staunchly anti-tovid restrictions. Gathering cell phone location data from telecoms to find out where people are still congregating amid the coronavirus shutdown. So that's just a little bit of state surveillance through our handheld devices. And of course it's for the greater good. Lots of women found FBS showing COVID. Some, because they were looking to connect with other women who also felt that the reaction to the pandemic had been excessive. Others felt isolated and they wanted to find community online. I don't think that any of this would have happened without COVID. And I saw that very rapid growth. That growth included their most ambitious product to date. Emily and Yolanda were opening what they were calling an authentic midwifery school. I just want to remind you that neither Emily nor Yolanda are midwives. To announce the enrollment for our radical birth keeper school is now open. Classes began June 1st, so head over to our website and get the details. The time is now and we need you to join us in this birth revolution. Emily knew that in many jurisdictions, use of the word midwifery without a license is a little. So in order to maneuver around these unjust laws, I made up the term radical birth keeper many years ago when I first started attending births outside the system. I wanted a name to call myself and so Emily came up with the term radical birth keeper. This is how it's planning it to her students. So to be crystal clear, a radical birth keeper is in practice in authentic midwife. It's simply that we chose to come up with some new terms to navigate the political terrain, given that the word midwife has become criminalized for anyone who isn't sanctioned by the state to use it legally. In the US, it usually takes three to five years to become a licensed midwife. Not all midwives in the US are licensed. Some choose not to be or others are in states without licensure, but they're usually highly skilled and have a apprentice for many years learning from elder midwives. But Emily and Yolanda were creating something different. So toward authentic midwives, trained in an online course. In three months, on Zoom. Did you think at the end of it you weren't going to be effectively an unlicensed midwife? Yes ma'am. And that's what Emily kept saying, kept referring to us within the school, within the radical birth keeper school. All they would always say is we are authentic midwives. We are traditional midwives. We are the real midwives. This is Tilly Sullivan, a former radical birth keeper, often abbreviated to RBK from California. She borrowed the $6,000 course fee from a relative. A $6,000 loan was not something Tilly took lightly. She's a low income single mother who until recently was on food stamps. Like I cried when I got the email saying I was accepted. I cried. It was the brightest, shiniest, like, prettiest opportunity that I had seen in my life. Perhaps surprisingly, given the course was only three months, around half of it wasn't actually about birth. Remember that self-help book that Emily was into in her twenties? The ten commitments of conscious leadership? Well, there were modules on that. Hey women, I want to talk about power dynamics and this idea of non-hierarchical sisterhood, support, relationships, and self-responsibility. And sessions on how to build your brand and market yourself online. Or which Instagram birth pages, for example, are attracting the kind of women that you want to be working with. And those are the spaces where you're going to find women talking, women talking about their hopes, talking about their dreams, their fears, and talking about their desires. Hilly thought that the business and self-help stuff was useful. But when it came to the modules on Bath, she was shocked. As they stated in their marketing repeatedly, time after time, I thought that I would learn a comprehensive birth education. That wasn't what she got. They acted like emergencies were not real. And they literally said, they are so rare. Emergencies. As we have already mentioned, there are very few situations during birth that in my view represent immediate emergencies. But there are some. And so it is important, I think, to discuss what that might look like. I also want to say very openly that I have never been in a situation in 20 years of being involved in birth, during which I have been present for a woman when an immediately emergent situation has arisen that has required immediate transfer to a medical facility. I mean, it was just, it was insane. Now that I think logically about it. Only a few modules cover emergencies and birth complications. Meaning things like having breach babies or weak-long labors or gestational diabetes. Things that doctors and midwives would say increase the risks to mothers and babies in birth. But, to FBS, these are what they called variations of normal. This was a line that Yolanda and Emily used all the time to suggest normal. Maybe deal. The definition of a variation of normal versus a complication versus an emergency is fluid and changeable and highly subjective. We collected a range of FBS advice on pregnancy and birth and we checked it with a group of experts. An obstetrician, two leading midwifery professors from the US and the UK, and a home birth midwife with 25 years of experience. They said some FBS advice is broadly correct but other parts were wrong and not just wrong but dangerous misinformation that could cost lives. Like this from Yolanda, a newborn baby who was struggling to breathe. In these heavily systematized, standardized realms of medicine, including regulated midwifery, there are like standards that have to be met. If you see chest contractions, you must transform. If the baby is not like there's charts and I've seen all of this in lots of situations and in none of those situations has it been an actual problem. Just to be clear, a newborn baby that is showing chest contractions needs urgent medical care. One of our experts, an experienced home birth midwife, described this advice as despicable. Another, a Yale midwifery professor, was so disturbed by the FBS related materials we shared with her that she emailed me to say she hadn't slept for two nights. Peely finished the 12-week course and now she was an RBT trained in attending births by Emily and Yolanda. I gave it all that I could and got business cards right away. I did my website immediately like everything that they told me to do and I found a client. Peely followed Emily and Yolanda's advice. Never take payments in advance. Instead, after a successful birth, accept gifts of cash between $3,000 and $5,000. Here's Emily teaching her students about this. So the hard truth is that if anything negative were to occur at the birth, be it a transfer, complications or something funky with the parents, turning on you or blaming you, it's going to be a lot more self-protective to not have a money trail that you charge them directly for anything. Yeah, talk about a red flag, man. Peely's first clients were a young farming couple from her local area who were paying for her services with warm milk. Deep down, Peely said she knew she wasn't qualified, but she went ahead anyway. I didn't think that I could handle any situation. I knew that. I was practicing delusional optimism, I guess. Once labor began, Peely says she couldn't find a heartbeat with her fetus scope. They thought the baby had died actually. Father was crying and like freaking out. And the family transferred to the hospital. We ended up going on the third day and it was C-section. Peely says the baby was transverse, meaning that it was in a sideways position, a potentially dangerous situation for mother and baby. That was something that the RBK told me and taught us would never happen. And it happened on my first birth. FPS materials we've seen don't say a transverse position is impossible, but they describe it as incredibly rare. Peely never attended another birth again. And she still paid off the debt for the course. In 2021, as the money from the RBK school was pouring in, Emily began building what she sometimes called her empire or her kingdom. She bought a house in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. I've seen pictures, it looks beautiful. She spent over $100,000 putting a swimming pool and an outdoor kitchen into the backyard. One friend remembers Emily asking how much it costs to get a private jet. As well as the home, Emily also bought the adjoining land. She had a plan. She just told me her vision of like she wants to host retreats and she wants to have a women's festival over the solstice every year where hundreds of women can come with their babies. 70-pity day again, who by now is working for Emily. Being paid to lead some of the community tools that are included in the FPS private membership fee. She was planning the festival and she was marketing the festival before she had closed on the land. Okay, so for anyone who doesn't know, we did it. We moved to the gorgeous Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina and our family bought over 60 acres of really some of the most special, rich, sacred land I've ever walked. And I want to share with you, it's been a long-standing dream of mine to host a woman's festival just for us. And what could be a better time than this coming summer solstice? The first matriarch rising festival took place in the summer of 2021. It had long been part of Emily's vision to have a burning man's style festival only in the south, a five-day women's only event. On the website, tickets are now advertised for $2,000. Singing around the fire, laughing, crying, and hugging for four days straight. There were lots of women from Freiber Society, many of which who had gone through Radical BirthKeeper School, who were also there as like volunteer helpers. This is Paola Williams, herself a Foma Abitai student. You're surrounded with other women. You're in a beautiful meadow. The sun is shining. There's dragonflies flying around. You're surrounded by trees. It's very calm and relaxing to just be in your skin. The festival, which ran for five years, had yoga sessions and swimming circles and live DJ sets featuring Emily as DJ matriarch won. Four-pan woman, she's a radical birth keeping with Emily. What would that be? So that was just an opportunity for her to talk about herself, talk about her credentials and all of the birthwork that she's done. She wore a crown to it and she sat in a shaded meadowy area and all of these women were gathered around her with their notebooks, just taking down every single word that she said and she'd do all of that whilst wearing a crown. For many of the women we interviewed, matriarch rising was a beautiful and true expression of the values that FPS did for health, community, sisterhood. One of my favorite moments of my life actually was that first day that the festival started. We were all so hopeful and proud of being a part of something that we really thought was going to change the world. There were many women like Paola and Sevendipity who are pended their lives to be part of Emily's movement. They saw her as a champion of women. That's how Katelyn Pell Codhill saw her too. She's like a powerhouse, that's how it fell at that time. Katelyn had had an amazing experience free-bathing her third child after finding FPS. It changed my life because I'd never felt that much power in my body before. And because of that, she wanted to work with Emily to help other women to have the same. She is such a force to be reckoned with, she's fearless, she's not afraid to speak up for women. I wanted to support that movement. But eventually, Katelyn and the others, within to see that Emily behind the scenes, did not always embody the values she publicly celebrated. She really didn't like or respect women, and she only really cared about herself. Very catty, very judgy, very bitchy, making rude comments, dismissive. Over time, I was like, "Oh, like this is who she is. Everything else is a total facade." Coming up. Inside Emily's Inner Circle. Before I tell you about the FPS Inner Circle, I want to say that the interviewees you're about to hear from have all had disagreements with Emily. Power and Emily ended up in a leadal dispute which was settled out of court. We interviewed many people for our reporting who didn't go on the record, and we learned that Emily often fell out with her Inner Circle. There's even a term for them that FPS insiders use, her fallen soldiers. As Emily didn't provide a substantive response to our requests for comment, including to these allegations, you're only going to hear their accounts. So, people who know Emily say she's a really hard-working business woman, and she values people who can bring stills to her team. Like, I was really good at the time of being able to make headline clickbait phrases. And so I think that she saw that in me, and she would ask me for post titles all the time. She's like, "Okay, this is the copy. Help me come up with a post title." And I was doing that for free because I loved it, you know? I was like, "Yeah, I am really good at this." Like, yay! From the inside, seven-dipity can see how it all worked. She saw how Emily created the comments on FPS social media, and the remarkable frequency with which she would simply kick out people who didn't agree with her. I never had the desire to ever inquire about anyone that she was booting from the group. Because I knew that that would make me look bad. She is constantly looking at the comments on Instagram, and bitching about them, and complaining about them. At first, Paula thought that the way Emily would talk about other people was just her having a bad day. Oh, she just must be like venting, you know? I didn't think much of it, because I was like, "Oh, you know, whatever. It can't be like a thing forever." But it was. It was consistent. It was very much who she was. And what was she saying about the people on Instagram? The people that were commenting. Oh, they have no life, how lame, what low number of followers they have. She would often make a comment about a woman in my radical birth keeper cohort, and just, "Oh, she's, you know, it's really sad to think about." She's saying like, "Oh, this person is just so insecure, like I can't stand how insecure she was. She was doing like personal coaching sessions with this person." And so she would be like, "Oh my god, I just, she was basically saying like, I get the ick every time I just like try to coach her." Kaylyn Powell-Cottill, who had got a job doing the social media for Emily, remembers one time, when some RBK students were complaining that Emily was trying to charge some extra money to keep the recordings of the online classes. And she called them whiny entitled bitches on a staff call, and it just became clear all she would talk about was money, follower count growth, business growth, and it was just like running a business. She didn't talk about birth at all. Like I got into this as a movement to talk about birth and what that means for the world. She was trying to use this movement as a way to make money. How much do you think she's motivated by money? I think she's 100% motivated by money. Seven-dipity again. One of the mantras that she told me to have is she's walking around with my money in her pocket. And so every single time that I have an interaction with a potential client to just tell myself that over and over and over again is that she's walking around with my money in her pocket. Like, you know, of course, if you know, if you're working full-time, you need to be paid for it, but it's, this is we're talking about women that are giving birth and that are the most vulnerable. Yeah. Did she ever like acknowledge that anyway? I think that the way that she acknowledged that was to say that when we kind of had that thought process that we were victimising them and infantilising them, analysis of FBS's financials suggest that when you take all of FBS's revenue stream since 2018, membership fees, online courses, and events like the Matriot Rising Festival, a conservative estimate suggests that it has brought in over $13 million. So, Indipity stopped working for FBS in 2023. That was two years ago. She thought a lot about FBS since. At the time, she saw Emily as a toxic boss a bit of a nightmare, but she didn't think too much about the FBS impacts in the world. But now, looking back, she realises there was something she missed, something much darker, much bigger. The amount of women who had experienced stillbirths joined in the community grief calls. We would all hold them and, you know, space with them and cry with them and, you know, say sweet words and, you know, I was definitely one of the ones to, like, come off Mike and respond and I would say stuff like, "Oh, mama, you're so powerful. Like, this is just going to make you a better mother." And you're going to have other babies and, you know, like, this is just part of life. Did it feel, or looking back? Does it feel now that there were an unusual amount of people that were having stir this? Looking back, absolutely. Looking back, I am, like, appalled at the small amount of women in her membership in the high infant mortality there is. And I think that I was willingly, like, turning a blind eye to a lot of the grief and death that was happening. And I was tracking it up to like, "Oh, yep, death happens. Death is a variation of normal, you know. Death doesn't need to be traumatic unless you make it traumatic." I did not believe that a hospital could have saved those babies. At all, like, no matter what, no amount of prenatal care, no amount of hospital care, no amount of interventions could ever actually save a baby. And that's truly, truly, truly, what I believed. Women, today is a big day. I have an amazing episode for you, and we have officially launched our one-year-long Midwifery School, Matra Birth Midwifery Institute. I am so pumped to be birthing this into the world with my creative partner, Yolanda Norris Clark, because you have been asking us for this. In so many stories, there's that moment where the protagonist flies too close to the sun, that moment of hubris before a downfall. And for FBS, this was it. In September 2024, the Radical Birth Deepest School was still proving it's extremely popular, but Emily and Yolanda wanted to take it one step further. It's a massive program, but you're ready for it. The world is ready for this, right? And so, the Matra Birth Midwifery Institute's MMI opened its virtual doors, a $12,000 year-long course which builds itself as a quote, "Gold standard, online intensive, Midwifery School" I-B-I-R-T-H MidwiferyInstitute.com. I'll see you on the inside. The Small Print was more opaque, a disclaimer said the course would focus on, quote, "Core areas of knowledge essential for aspiring midwives who would receive quote, grounded, evidence-based education in the physiology of pregnancy and birth. In many ways, it was much like the RBK School. A mix of sound advice, incomplete advice, and unscientific, dangerous misinformation. Even if infection the way that we're taught it within the alopathic sphere were real, there would be a pretty much 0% chance of anything happening, even if you did cut a baby's cord with like an old rusty fork or whatever. But this time, expectations from the students were higher. And soon, people began to ask questions about the quality of the education they were receiving. I was really disappointed, but I kept thinking it was going to get better. It was very confusing. The definition of what an emergency is and how to even figure out if there is an emergency was totally incoherent and inconsistent. That's Emma Moore and before her, Molly Flam, both MMI students in 2024. That was an overarching thing that they kept saying is that you're just not going to know what you're doing until you attend a few births. So you got to just go out there and start doing it and mess up and have these bad experiences because this is supposed to be a tissue. And it's like, okay, there's certainly some truths to that, but it's also incredibly irresponsible to hold it $12,000. School to tell women to just go wing it. They sold the school as being evidence-based. That has a certain connotation like that means something specific. Evidence-based, it's going to be based on studies, peer-reviewed studies that have been published in medical journals. It's going to be have statistics like real evidence. All the videos just felt like Yolanda's own personal opinions. There was a growing number of women who were starting to see the same things and were very, very disappointed by the program. After raising concerns, Emma was ejected from MMI. She filed a complaint with the North Carolina Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division, accusing FBS of deceptive marketing. FBS hired a lawyer who denied the allegation. They argued MMI never marketed itself as a Certified Midwifery course, but as a provider of, quote, "personal development and sovereign birth-related education." Emma filed a rebuttal saying she knew the course was not for a midwifery license, but she still believed she'd been missold an education that was deficient. The Attorney General, which acts as an informal mediator, later closed the case. Around the same time that Emma was being ejected, a much more serious crisis was unfolding. One of the MMI students was a 23-year-old pregnant first-time mother. She was having a wild pregnancy, no prenatal care. She posted in the FBS membership on her fifth day of labour. The mother wrote that she was, quote, "exhausted and hitting a wall of confusion." Emma Lee responded, quote, "Sounds so normal and so hard. Baby is coming. You can do it." "Everybody just keeps commenting. You're doing great. Keep going. Sounds normal. Sounds normal." And I just keep my mouth shut. I'm like, "Doesn't sound normal to me, but not my place." On her ninth day of labour, she posted that her belly was taping on a strange shape as she contracted. And I thought to myself, "That sounds like Bando's ring." A rare but extremely serious medical emergency. But I didn't post anything because I just don't ever, you know, comment when a woman's in labour. Looking back on it, I wish I had said something. But I likely would have just been removed from the membership then. After nine days, the mother shared a video of her son. It's the video I mentioned in episode 1. It's the reason Lucian and I decided we had to go depot into this story. I remember why I was the first time I saw it. It's not something I will ever forget watching. The baby is grunting and struggling to breathe. The baby is dying. Members express their concern some strongly, but still, nobody told her to go to hospital or dial 911 immediately. The mother later posted, quote, "With a broken heart, I want to share that baby boy didn't make it." This video of a dying baby broke something like a spell had been lifted and some in the FBS community did see clearly again. Four years, it seemed deaths had been normalised in FBS, but this video was so heartbreaking, it was impossible to scroll away and possible to figure it. A few days later in March 2025, a Reddit community called FreeBurth Society Stam was created by a group of former followers. Its aim was, quote, "To help deprogram from the mind control, culty atmosphere and rigid dogma of FBS. Women posted accounts of their experiences. The following day, an MMI student posted inside a private chat for fellow students. "I would like to know," she wrote. White has not been addressed that a woman in this space in our current cohort lost her baby. No one encouraged her to seek medical attention ASAP, even though it was clearly a medical emergency. Emily deleted the post before ejecting her from the course. Here's Molly again. For me, it felt like they were covering that up. They were covering up what had happened to this mother. Over the coming weeks, 13 of around 70 students would leave or be picked out of MMI. I've thought a lot about this message. Why did nobody tell this mother to go to hospital? There's the membership rule, which states that you couldn't share plans to engage with the medical system, which many women took to mean you couldn't talk about hospitals at all. But I think there's something deeper at work, which is that FBS, over time, had made things that are intuitive, calling for help when a baby is clearly struggling to breathe. Feel wrong. It had scrambled that most basic, most sacred, human urge. Her mother's instinct. Let's time on the birth keepers. Lissie and I tracked down women around the world to find out just how far FBS influence has spread. 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 where the 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, cure or prevent any medical condition related to pregnancy or birth. It added, for medical advice, consult your health type provider. You can read all our reporting on the free birth society at thegardian.com. Reporting and presenting was by Shearing Kale and Lucy Osborne. The series producers were Elizabeth Cassin and Joshua Kelly. Field Production from Lucy Hoff. Music composition and sound design was by Rudy Zedadlo, the commissioning editors for Nicole Jackson and Paul Lewis. [BLANK_AUDIO]