Free birth is the home birth movement’s extreme edition. Its proponents advocate removing the guardrails of medicine, believing that the medicalization of childbirth results in too many unnecessary interventions. Although no one has exact figures, free births are believed to represent a tiny proportion of home births, a majority of which are planned and attended by midwives.
Online, interest in free births has trended upward, especially in the last year, according to ViralMoment, which analyzes social media: The approach has achieved a high enough profile that a woman who had planned to have a free birth was featured in the final episode of the hit series “The Pitt.” Recently, however, the movement has increasingly come under fire, with critics contending that it peddles misinformation about the birth process and that it has endangered, and in some cases cost, lives.
A spate of deaths linked to free births has brought more public attention, and women from the free birth community have been speaking out about the risks. In a post on Reddit, Brittany Cole, a stay-at-home mother from Alberta, Canada, described how moments after delivering a healthy girl in a free birth, she began to lose a lot of blood and drift out of consciousness. She was rushed to a clinic. “I probably would have died,” she said.
On social media, influencers have extolled free birth’s virtues, but the most prominent promoter of the method is the Free Birth Society. Since its founding in 2017 by a former doula, Emilee Saldaya, the society has sold access to a private online forum, classes for women and birth workers, and baseball caps saying, “Make Birth Great Again.”
The society now has 132,000 followers on Instagram, and its YouTube channel has received more than 27 million views. A podcast, according to the society’s website, has had more than five million downloads.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/science/free-birth-wild-pregancy-risks-home-birth.html
