Behind the Bastards - How The Internet Spawned A Baby-Killing Cult

Episode Date: March 17, 2020

Robert is joined by Caitlin Durante to discuss free birthers.FOOTNOTES: About Yolande Rise of the 'free birthers': These women are choosing to give birth without medical help — and at least one baby has died Home birth advocate’s baby dies during free birth, prompts questions An Infant’s Death Has Sparked A Heated Debate Around The "Free Birth" Movement She Wanted a ‘Freebirth’ at Home. When the Baby Died, the Attacks Began Why American infant mortality rates are so high Home births 'as safe as hospital' Woman: Doctor Told Me to “Shut Up and Push” What Is "Birth Rape"? Birthrape. Birthrape. Birthrape. Birthrape. Birthrape. The hallmark of women who choose freebirth: emotional immaturity Home deliveries Emilee Saldaya is as ethically responsible for baby Journey Moon’s death as if she had taken out a gun and shot her Radical Birth Keeper Consultation Rise in ‘freebirthing’ suggests women feel midwives and doctors are ignoring their needs Why do some women choose to freebirth? A meta-thematic synthesis, part one Free Birth Society Instagram Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I actually like that one. Oh, you like that one, Sophie? That's good. Yeah. Well, do you think that only people in America, in the U.S., listen to... Oh, solid point.

The podcast barber? If there's non-Americans listening to this podcast, what the hell are they doing? Like, this is... they don't get our freedom, our freedom of speech. That's ours and ours alone, Caitlin. The best thing about freedom of speech is limiting it to a small number of people. Yes, I don't agree, but I see your point. Yeah, I firmly disagree with what just happened, and I take back my praise of your introduction. Hello, international listeners. We love you.

Yeah, I bet they're from all over the world. Iceland, yes. Canada, yes. Japan, yes. Canada's just Alaska's Mexico. Oh, my God. No, Mexico and Canada are both much better countries. I almost spit my soup on the mic. Oh, my God.

It was a bad time to try to eat soup. Sorry, I took a week in rural America to clear my head and get some writing done, and it has made me insult our neighbors to the north and south for no reason. You did that before. Come on. I did, I did. I love insulting nations for no reason. Well, my guest today, as you just heard from, is Caitlin Durante. Caitlin, how are you doing today? I'm doing very well. I'm delighted to be here.

Now, Caitlin, you are the co-host of The Bechtelcast. It's true. And you have guested on Behind the Bastards before. We had a long talk about, I think a man both of us consider a dear friend now, Lafayette Ron Hubbard. Yes, yes. He's coming to my birthday party soon. Oh, good. You know, I think he's at all of our birthday parties, convincing our small children to deliver letters for him on his boat crusade to find gold in the ocean.

Yes. God, I miss him. I know. Well, we're not talking about that today, Caitlin. And we're not talking about the goat testicle doctor either, right? No, we're not talking about the goat testicle doctor either. We forgot about that fucker. Oh, that guy. Yeah.

Like Alex Jones, but with goat testicles. No, today we're talking about the free birthing community. Caitlin, have you ever heard of the free birthing community? I don't know that I have, Robert. Oh, boy. Caitlin. Yes. You're going to enjoy this. Okay.

So, I, God, where to start? I wrote a little introduction here, and I don't think I'm going to read it. I think we're just going to dig into it. Okay. Yeah. The nexus of my introduction was that back in the day, you know, there's this one website that's kind of like the Tower of Babel for the internet. There's something awful forums. It's where 4chan came out of. It's where like Doxing was very first practiced. It's where a lot of like meme culture originated from. Okay.

And that, those forums had a motto, and that motto was, the internet makes you stupid. And it was just at the time, because like the late 90s, early 2000s is when like something awful was really at its most relevant. I was alive. Yeah, so was I. And you remember then, Caitlin, when the internet didn't really matter, when like it was just sort of this silly thing and people like mainstream TV or news kind of made fun of people who were on the internet a lot. Like it wasn't taken very seriously. Right.

And so I think that's what the motto kind of meant then was just like the internet's dumb. But as the years have gone by and the internet has eaten the world, I've come to believe in those words very literally. The internet does actually make people stupid. And I think to the free birthing community in particular is a perfect example of how this works because thanks to the wonders of the modern internet and most particularly Facebook, a bunch of otherwise well-meaning functional human beings have left a trail of dead babies in their wake. Not because they wanted to kill babies, but because the internet broke their brains. And that's the story we're going to tell today. Wow.

Okay. You excited? This is a dead baby episode. Oh my. Okay. Wait. Okay. Initial question, preliminary question.

Sure. Do you know anything? Absolutely. I don't know anything about the free birthing community, but I have a feeling that there's got to be some overlap between it and just based on what I think it is based on the name alone. Overlap between that community and the anti-vaxxers. Do you know it? Oh, absolutely. Oh, yeah.

Okay. Okay. Oh my God. A hundred percent. Cool. Got it. Yeah. It's pretty cool, Caitlin.

And I want to welcome you, by the way, into a really rarefied circle of Bastard's Pod guests. Currently, Sophia Alexandria, Billy Wayne Davis are the only two members of the Dead Babies episodes sub-club. So very, can we get a couple of air horns in there for the third member of our dead baby triumvirate? Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. I just added some in case there weren't any so much. Are you honored, Caitlin?

I'm so honored. And what a group to be a part of. I mean, Billy Wayne and Sophia, I mean, what terrific people. Rarefied air. I'm honored. Rarefied air. Now, Caitlin, if you the listener at home have heard about the free birthing community recently, it's probably because of a fabulous NBC news article by Brandy Zadrozny that dropped a couple of days ago.

And the article's title was, I brainwashed myself with the internet. It is the story of a 28-year-old woman on the West Coast, pseudonymed Judith, who found herself slowly drawn into a series of online communities of women who believe that the best way to give birth is with no medicine, no doctor, and no midwife. So, you know, we are all aware that there's like home birthing, sort of like communities and stuff. These are people who are like that, but they're like, but midwives are evil too. Oh, wow. I don't want anyone who knows a goddamn thing about medicine around for my birth. Like, that's the gist of these people.

Huh. All right. Yeah. Yeah. So, that's a fun thing that I hadn't realized existed until I read this article. And the TLDR of the story is that Judith left her baby in her belly for way too long, more than 42 weeks, because these people believe, among other things, that having your labor-induced medically is an awful thing to do, and an unnecessary thing to do.

So, she was pregnant almost three weeks past the nine-month mark, and refused to go to the hospital, and her baby died inside of her. Yeah. This is the first time we've had a first-dead baby on page one. We're not even halfway through page one. Yeah. I bring that out in people, you know? The dead babies?

I don't know what I meant by that. Yeah. It's not weird really fast. I just, my presence encourages people to talk about dead babies is, I think, what I meant. Well, that's good. Well, we'll be talking about a number of them today. So, obviously, Judith's story was a traumatic, painful nightmare, and she's far from the only person that this kind of nightmare has happened to as a result of the free birthing community.

The NBC article itself links to a November 2018 Daily Beast article by Emily Sugarman. The article's title is, She Wanted a Free Birth at Home When the Baby Died, The Attacks Began. And it's the story of a woman named Lisa and her would-be daughter, Journey Moon. Lisa got drawn into the free birthing community via Facebook groups and podcasts, and her baby died. And then she was harassed by a bunch of people online who were angry that she'd killed her baby, who had been infiltrating these free birthing communities.

It's a mess of a story. And the tales of these two women comprise about 90% of the public discourse around free birthing at the moment. It's kind of very recently burst onto the scene. But there's so much more here under the surface than is even in both of these very well-written articles. And today, I felt like what I could do to add to this is dig a little bit deeper into where the free birthing community comes from. And the individual, I'm going to call them bastards who are responsible for starting what is effectively a weird cult dedicated to getting people to basically kill their babies by not having anyone who knows anything about medicine around when they come out of people.

It's cool. Fun story. Can't wait. You sound really motivated by this, to be a part of this fun tale. I so am. You have no idea. I have no ability to emote with my voice, but I am very excited to learn about this. We call that V-moting. Okay.

Now, free birthing obviously has its origins in the natural home birth movement. And the term home birth started being used in the mid-1800s as hospital births became more common. At present, most so-called developed nations, that's the term generally used. I don't like it, but it's kind of hard to find counter terms sometimes, have home birthing rates of less than 1%. It's broadly accurate to say that the end of home birthing as a normal thing, the end of that being the way most babies were born, has corresponded with a massive reduction in the rate of both infant and mother deaths in childbirth.

So we stopped giving birth at home, started giving birth in hospitals with doctors, and a lot less babies and moms die. Pretty obvious. Sure. But here's where it gets weird, because the situation isn't quite that simple. The United States today has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the Western world. Six of our infants die for every thousand live births, which puts the U.S. on par with such health care powerhouses as Serbia and Malaysia.

Despite regular advances in technology matters, matters are actually getting a lot worse for American mothers at a startlingly rapid rate. A pregnant woman in the U.S. today is 50% more likely to die in childbirth than her mother was. Huh. Yeah. Like, that's an enormous jump in mama and baby deaths. Right. What would account for that? What accounts for that? Well, there's a number of intersecting factors here.

One of the ones given regularly is eroding social support for women. So as a result of this crusade against birth control and Planned Parenthood by the right in our country, women's access to obstetric services and rural U.S. counties has collapsed. 9% of all rural American women lost hospital obstetric services between 2000 and 2014. The shocking expense of birth plays a major role in this, too. People who just can't afford to do it in a hospital. So between the cost and the sheer lack of access, the fact that growing communities of American women have been turning to home birth is not weird.

And it's not necessarily harmful, either. The Netherlands actually has a really high rate of home births. In 2009, the largest study of its kind was conducted there, analyzing more than 530,000 births and finding no difference in the birth or death rates of home births versus hospital births. And you'll hear this study cited a lot by home birthing advocates, and they all tend to leave out something critical, which is that the home birthing mothers in this Netherlands study

were all women who were determined by a doctor beforehand to have low-risk pregnancies. So if you have a competent midwife, and if a doctor is consulted first to make sure you're a low-risk pregnancy, home birthing can be perfectly safe. Sure. That's the one thing I want to get out of the way first. But our free birthing friends who we're going to be talking about today, they don't use midwives, and they for sure as shit don't consult doctors. And most of the Facebook groups with these people gather,

explicitly list advising another person to seek medical attention as a banable offense. So they'll say, if you advise anyone to go to a doctor to induce pregnancy to talk to an OBGYN or whatever, we'll kick you out of the group because this is not about that. Okay. These are the people... I feel like these are the people who if they were convicted of a crime or they had to go to court or something, they'd be like,

I'm going to represent myself. Like, I don't need a lawyer. I'm going to just dance on my own. Wow. Yeah. Okay. There's that phrase like a person who defends themselves in court has a fool for a lawyer. I guess a person who delivers their own baby has a fool for an OBGYN or an obstetrician. Yes.

Yeah. So the first Facebook page that comes up now when you Google free birth Facebook group currently hosts an image meme that says, we are all descendants of someone who birthed at home without a licensed midwife. And that is true, but you could just as easily say, we're all descendants of someone who died at home giving birth without any sort of medical assistance because that's equally true. Right.

Yeah. We all have a grandma here who got through a couple of babies and then couldn't make it past fifth or sixth or whatever. Right. Yeah. This is going to be a fun one. That just made me think like who, like, did I have like a great, great, great, great grandmother who like died during childbirth, but like their baby survived and like I'm the descendant of.

Absolutely. Yeah. That's got to be true for most people probably. 100% of us. There's no one who somewhere in their family line doesn't have multiple people who died during childbirth. Yeah. Just to guarantee just because of the way the world, biology and shit worked and works. So when we're trying to unravel the mystery of how this deadly free birthing community came to be,

because I wanted to kind of trace it back to its origins. And my first question when I started doing that was, when did this whole movement split off from just the home birthing movement? And as best as I can tell, a lot of it traces back to the story of one woman named Catherine Skoll. Now, Miss Skoll was a former Chicago police officer and she was pregnant with her fifth child back in 2008. She was admitted to Rush University Medical Center and received an unpleasant surprise. Her normal obstetrician was out of town on vacation. So instead of the doctor she was comfortable with, she was attended to by a stranger,

and a stranger who happened to be a really big asshole. According to Miss, yeah, yeah, he sucks. Dr. Scott Pierce is his name and he apparently started their interaction by yelling at her for not coming in earlier and not calling before coming in. He informed her that because she had not given them enough warning, there was no time for him to give her pain medication. Then he told her that she deserved to be in pain for not giving the hospital more lead time, saying sometimes pain is the best teacher.

Wow. He's like a great person. Not a great doctor. He next gave her an extremely rough vaginal exam that she described as unnecessarily rough and painful while she was in mid-contraction. And then he ordered her to begin pushing before she was fully dilated. He told her repeatedly that her baby might die and had a loud phone conversation in the next room about abortion, telling another one of his patients that stupid woman, she has no business being pregnant.

So pretty bad story. Yeah. Not how you want a pregnancy to go. No. And Catherine Skoll is not the bastard here. She filed a civil suit against Dr. Pierce. He was eventually fined $500 and sentenced to one year of medical probation, which seems like a reasonably fair punishment for his crime.

I feel, yeah. I would, well, find only $500. Yeah, I think the fine could have been higher. The fine should have been higher. Yeah, he was definitely, like, when a medical board looked into it, they found out that, like, yeah, this guy's behavior was completely unacceptable. And the story of, so, like, Catherine Skoll did nothing wrong. She was abused by a doctor. She filed a suit against him and he was punished.

You know, we could argue the punishment should have been more, but her part of the story, she acted perfectly reasonably. Sure. But the story of Catherine Skoll took off like wildfire among the networks of mommy blogs dedicated to the natural birthing movement. And without knowing it, Skoll became a rallying point for other women who had bad experiences with their doctors during childbirth. Skoll's story helped to galvanize a community of birthing extremists who had started organizing online. And one of the very first, and perhaps the founder of the free birthing movement, was an Australian woman named Jeanette Frazier. Jeanette founded the website Joyous Birth in 2007. In December of that year, she coined the term birth rape in a blog entry to refer to what she thought people like Dr. Pierce were doing to their patients.

Birth rape. Hmm. Yeah. So here's kind of her explaining what that means. I don't care if you don't like the word or the idea, it's real, so get used to it. Survivors are angry and we are starting to talk about it. Remember that old anti-violent slogan, well, it means even in hospitals and even in stupid hospital gowns, when I say no, it means no. When you shove your arm in a woman who's screaming no, that's rape.

When you rupture those membranes because you have to tick the box that comply with protocol, even when the woman screams no, that's rape. When you slash a woman's vagina with scissors and she's screaming no, that's rape. And on the streets, it would earn you a jail sentence. Your green gown is not protection. Do that to me and I will charge you. Don't forget it. We are angry and we are powerful. We have survived your raping protocol so we can survive anything.

Be afraid and don't underestimate us. And I'm curious kind of for your thoughts on that. I'll tell you sort of where I land on this, which is that I'm sure there are a lot of things that happen to women who are giving birth that they may say no about because once you're giving birth to a baby, the doctor is going to like legally has to do whatever he can or she can do to make sure that baby comes out alive. And you might not in the moment want that, but you're in a hospital and that's kind of the way hospitals go. And I'm personally like obviously I'm very pro-choice, but at the point in which that baby is coming out, like the doctor is equally beholden to the baby and to the mother. That's kind of how I think. Sure. Yeah, I'm not interested in, yeah.

I mean, child birth, that does like complicate matters because on one hand you have, I kind of see what she's saying in this definition of this term of doctors doing things that could be considered rape or assault. And like the women or the people who are giving birth not giving consent, but the doctors doing something that they deem medically necessary for the safety of the baby perhaps. So that is a very complicated thing. Okay, so I, okay, well, let's do this. I don't know if you know this, Robert, or if any listeners are aware of a podcast that I've been working on called Sludge, an American healthcare story. So, and this is all about a recent experience I had with the American healthcare system. Spoiler shit. It was shit.

So I, and I'm not saying that every, you know, a healthcare experience of every person in the US is shitty. It's not if you have a million dollars or more. So, but you know, I, this is all to say that I have hearing people's stories because I've started to interview other people with their sort of medical nightmare stories and I'm learning all these different things about how certain like medical protocol is not very good. One specific example I will cite is the way that the medical community treats like intersex babies, which is horrible and they perform procedures and surgeries that the babies can't consent to. And that the parents often don't know enough about the situation, you know, just all these things. So on one hand, like, yes, they're like having people who know about childbirth and who know about protocol for medical protocol for childbirth should be present at a childbirth. But there's also certain things that medical professionals sometimes do that are perhaps violating patients. I have very complicated feelings about the whole thing.

It is really complicated. I don't like calling it rape because I don't know, rape is a very specific thing. And I understand how some of the trauma, you know, of undergoing being forced to undergo a medical procedure, you don't want to undergo or don't, you know, are kind of not present enough mentally to like understand what's happening to you. Because you're in this like really altered state. Like, I understand how that would be traumatic. But I feel weird about saying that like, if a doctor does something you don't want because he's trying to save your baby's life, that that's the same as rape. That's weird to me. Sure.

But like, there's a bunch of shit, obviously, that like, yeah, doctors do without the consent of the baby, like with intersex babies. And also like, you can make an argument about circumcision where it's like, that's not a medically necessary thing you're doing and the child should maybe have some say in what happens to its own body. Right. So like, yeah, this is like, this whole issue, like, I want to kind of highlight that like, while this community we're talking about, I think is fundamentally toxic, there are some reasonable questions that like start, that we're being asked at the start of this. And I think this woman, Jeanette Frazier, is going too far and kind of, yeah, we'll talk about her more in a bit. But I don't think like, she's entirely, and these other people are entirely coming out of an unreasonable place. The healthcare system and the child birthing system in this country is fucked. And like, the fact that women today are 50% likely to die in childbirth is as much evidence as you need to know about that.

It's really messy. I wonder if she just came up with that term, birth rape, because it sounds sort of like birth rate. And she's like, won't this be a catchy phrase or something? I don't like. You know what? That might be the case. We'll see how you think about that when we finish talking about Jeanette Frazier. Robert, do you want to know what else is a really catchy phrase?

Oh, I was going to say, do you want to know what won't perform medical procedures on your child's genitalia without their consent? Oh, I think that's our sponsors who offer products and services. That is the only guarantee we make about our sponsors, Mike Bloomberg and the Raytheon Corporation. They will not order surgery on your children. I can't vouch for Mike Bloomberg on that. No, he will. He will absolutely order. And Raytheon will as well. So enjoy these words from our sponsors who may in fact order your children to undergo medical procedures that are not strictly necessary.

And! During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

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And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

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How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! Okay, so we're talking about this woman, Jeanette Frazier, who coins the term birth rape, and she has this website, Joyus Birth. And Joyus Birth advocated for legal reform around pregnancy. And the core ideology on display there is the same core ideology that we saw creep up later in the free birthing community. And the basic idea is that women should be the absolute arbiters of what happens during their pregnancy. Which, like, there's aspects of that that sound reasonable, but, like, obviously, I do think there is a certain point where we're like,

no, you've got two human beings here now, and, like, you don't get to make every... I don't know. I have a lot of issues in general with the amount of control parents have over what happens to their kids' bodies that worries me. So, yeah, this is a really messy and complicated thing. But Joyus Birth was very clearly from the beginning focused around the desire to, like, not have any medical procedures performed on your children to do it all naturally or holistically with, like, whatever remedies you could whip up in your kitchen. It had a forum with a few dozen members, and that forum had threads with titles like, Strep, question mark, question mark, can this be treated without antibiotics? Another ear infection, dot, dot, dot, what can I do to avoid the antibiotics?

So, not only... So, once their children have been birthed assuming they survive, they're against all medical assistance for the rest of their kids' life? Okay. Yeah, there's a lot of talk about how can I avoid antibiotics for my children with bacterial infections. One of the threads from Mummy Juice just says, blood and poo, question mark, which I'm sure does not end with a happy story. So, not a great community. We can agree there's some problems with the way child birthing is handled by the medical establishment, but, like, yeah, if you're typing out, my kid keeps getting ear infections, how can I deal with this without treating it with medicine? Like, maybe you're doing a bad job? I don't know. Just give that kid some goat testicles, and then it'll...

It's a cure-all, as we learned. Or audit the child, get an e-neeter out, you know? Yeah. So, it's pretty cool. Now, I'm not exactly sure when all these women started using the term free birth to describe what they were advocating, but by March of 2009, that change had happened. And the first time I run across the word free birthing to refer to this community is when Jeanette Frazier was interviewed by a website called The Age. And I'm going to quote from that interview. This is right before she was supposed to give birth to her fifth child. Jeanette Frazier is in labor. Her plan is to drop the baby on the lounge room floor

or wherever feels good at the time. Has she called the hospital to let them know what's happening? When you go on a skiing trip, do you call the hospital to say, I'm coming down the mountain, can you set aside a spot for me in the emergency room? I don't think so, says Frazier, whose breathing sounds strained. Amazing logic. Yeah. I mean, they generally do have medical professionals at ski lodges and stuff because of the dangers of skiing. Right.

Yeah. This is pretty much where we end the conversation that started with me calling Frazier and asking if it was true that her organization, Joyous Birth, was advocating that women go it alone giving birth at home with no midwife or general practitioner or bags of resuscitation gadgets. Free birthing, plenty of women do it, she says. In fact, Frazier is doing it right now. I prefer to be an autonomous care provider, she says. So that's kind of the terminology used here. Yeah.

I mean, okay. So I'm obviously all for giving women agency over their bodies, right? Right. That's important. Absolutely. So it feels like this community, they like started with that, but then have taken it far too far. Yeah. I mean, and I'm sure you're going to get into this soon, but like all, I mean, we prefaced it, the dead babies.

Oh, yeah. So like obviously the results aren't often good, it seems, with free birthing. But like, oh, it's so annoying that they're doing this under the guise of like, yes, women's autonomy and agency and look how important it is because that is important. But then they've like bastardized it into this like disgusting, killing baby enterprise. Yeah. And it is frustrating to me that they're kind of co-opting a lot of the language of the pro-choice movement because it is like when that baby's a clump of cells, when it's not capable of living independently in any way, shape, or form,

I think it would be horrible to give anyone but the mother control over her own body. But at the point that that thing's been in there nine months and it's coming out and it can survive on its own, like this is no longer just you here, there's an independent living human being that also has rights. Yeah. And it is kind of messy drawing that line. But certainly at the point at which you're 41 weeks pregnant, I think, yeah, I don't know. Especially just because like, I mean, I don't know anything about childbirth, nor will I because I don't intend to have children ever. But like, there are so many people who do intend to have children who still like there's only, unless you're trained as a midwife or a medical professional,

it seems like a really dangerous thing to go at alone. Yeah. And it's like, these are people who are kind of like refusing for there to be any kind of like reasonable middle path here. Because the evidence does show that if you're checked out by a doctor beforehand and you have a midwife, home birthing can be a totally safe process. But they're like, no, fuck that midwife thing and fuck checking with a doctor. That's all a violation of my rights, which is dumb, I think. I think it's a dumb way to do things. It's not good.

Yeah. So Jeanette is probably the clearest case for the founder of the free birthing movement and her baby, who she was pregnant with when that article was written, Royzen, was born five days after the article dropped. Jeanette delivered him without assistance in her home and Royzen was born alive, but not breathing. His heart was not beating properly. He was not stillborn, but he did come out in immediate need of expert resuscitation. And unfortunately, no expert was available, and all Jeanette's arnica creams and herbal child birthing remedies were useless in the face of this cold reality. Imagine that.

Yeah. I'm going to quote from the coroner's report about her dead baby. Quote, Essentially, Ms. Frazier was quite unprepared for what happened. There was not even a hard flat surface available on which Royzen could be placed for resuscitation. So these three amateurs, Ms. Frazier, Mr. Stokes and Ms. Deuce, first placed the child on the rim of the inflatable pool, and when that proved unsatisfactory, used a chair. They were unable to abandon the chair and place Royzen on the floor in order to effectively administer CPR,

because the placenta not having been delivered, that was as far as she would reach. Evidently, it appeared to nobody present to clamp and cut the cord, and anyway, Ms. Deuce told the inquest she had not been aware of the ready availability of any equipment to enable her to do so. According to Ms. Deuce, further difficulties were encountered in administering CPR, because Royzen was slippery and difficult to hold, and evidently, it did not occur to anybody to wrap her in a towel, though there were towels nearby. How? Yeah.

Yeah, it's fucked up. Wow. So in a case like this, I mean, this is like straight up negligence, right? Where like the baby... Yeah, I would say so. The baby died, and the mom was responsible? Like, is she a murderer now? Like, does she face...

No, she legally know. And in most parts of the world, she will not legally face consequences for this. You know, it's kind of a thing. We're only just now, within a pretty recent period of time, where like parents would get... start to get in trouble in some places for like refusing to give their kids necessary blood transfusions, because of a religious belief. Like, you can still get away with that, actually, in a number of places. Mm-hmm.

So this is not a thing where like the women who do this are generally prosecuted at all. Okay. Although, yeah, I would agree with you. This seems like negligence of maybe a criminal nature. Yeah, it's like manslaughter, maybe? I don't know. Like, it's something. Yeah, baby slaughter.

Baby slaughter. Oh, that's a horrible phrase. So that's Jeanette Frazier, one of the founders of the free birthing movement. And the other woman, usually given as a founder for the free birthing movement, is Laura Shanley. She was interviewed in December of 2008, the same month Catherine Scholl filed charges against her doctor. And she was interviewed for an ABC news article titled, Mothers to Be, Saying No to Modern Medicine. Now, that article does not use the term free birthing, which is part of why I think Jeanette Frazier

probably gets the credit for that. But it does mention a dead baby. Laura Shanley's dead baby, to be precise. Shanley had successfully delivered her first four children at home. She delivered the fifth too, but he had a rare heart deformity, and he died. Shanley claims this had nothing at all to do with the fact that she chose to give birth without any expert medical care present. Quote, if you have a baby that's born at home, and especially in an unassisted birth, regardless of the fact that the coroner said, this baby would not have survived, you know, there are still people that will blame me for my baby's death,

Shanley said. And that's just something I have to accept. Now, I'm not competent to diagnose whether Shanley's child would have died if he'd been born in a hospital, but someone who is competent is Dr. Amy Tuture, an obstetrician gynecologist who runs a blog called The Skeptical OB, and focuses mainly on busting misinformation about pregnancy. She has a special hatred for free birthing and notes of Ms. Shanley's pregnancy. She made no attempt to stop the premature birth of a son and watched him die in the bathtub.

So, yeah. Two founders of the movement, two dead babies. That's where we're starting here. Okay. Cool stuff, huh? Yeah. Really, really cool stuff. Caitlin's looking at me like, Sophie, why did you bring me here?

How you feeling, Caitlin? You know, I am really just frustrated by the willful negligence of this movement. I'll buy you a suplementation next time we get dinner. Thank you so much. We are five pages in, Caitlin, and we have four dead babies. So, we are almost one dead baby per page of this. Wow. Yeah.

Pretty cool. What a rate. What a rate. So, Shanley and Frazier were the two earliest, loudest voices in the splinter of the home birthing movement that turned into free birthing. They both led large online communities that increasingly pushed their members away from trusting actual medical professionals for anything. Dr. Tautour blames them for a lot of this, and she considers their activism to be the result of extreme emotional immaturity. And she wrote on her blog, quote, Free birthers are monstrously egotistical, reflexively defiant of authority, unwilling to admit mistakes,

incapable of accepting responsibility for their own actions, and entirely devoid of any empathy for their suffering babies. Yeah, so that sums up for me. I wonder if they're all just like narcissists who are like, I don't need a doctor, I'm a genius, and I can handle this on my own. I don't think all of the women who get sucked into it are. I think most of them are probably pretty normal people who are kind of maybe more inclined to like sort of hippie-dippy stuff and like kind of like off the grid. A lot of like off the grid sort of like, you know, back to nature, almost survivalist kind of women get really into this because they're attracted to the idea of self-sufficiency.

Sure. But I do think the people at the head of this movement, the women who are sort of like driving it, I think there is a lot of narcissism. Got it. And you can see that in the things that they say. For example, in the wake of her baby's death, Janet Frazier made this defiant statement. My birth rape with my first child is traumatic. My stillbirth was not. Hmm.

Yeah. That just sounds like a lie to justify what she's doing with free birthing. Yeah. And also like regardless of what happened with your first child, that baby's alive. It gets to live a life. Right. Yeah. And your other baby is not.

Yeah. And note the difference like. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So another story that a doctor to tour sites of like kind of narcissism at the heart of a lot of these free birthing people is the case of a woman named Paula, P-A-A-L-A. Her infant son was born extremely early, weighing only one pound six ounces. He had to spend four months in the NICU and only survived due to intense medical intervention.

Paula was forced to give birth in the hospital because something was very clearly wrong with her pregnancy. But she still insisted on giving birth as close to a loan as she possibly could. And I'm just going to read what she wrote on her Facebook page for a community of other free birthers because it's fucking wild. Hmm. I took out my IV lines. Nothing was being pumped into them at that point anyway. And my hospital bracelet. I wanted to take a shower with both arms free of junk.

I figured they could put that crap back on me if it was an emergency, but I needed to feel like myself again. Did I mention they tracked and measured everything that came out of my body? Shortly thereafter, she was in active labor with a premature baby. She retreated to the hospital bathroom to decide what to do. Option one, she wrote, called the nurses and either be prodded while birthing right there or be wheeled in for an emergency C-section. Option two, wake my husband and labor with him secretly, but then I know he'd lose his cool and call for help. Option three, labor by myself with my baby, just us, and I'd birth him and catch him and then call for help. Obviously, I went for option three.

It seemed like the safest thing for my baby and myself at the time. The studies I'd read didn't report benefits for a C-section for babies of his age. That vaginal would have been safer and I knew he'd get drugged up and controlled by strangers was going to make things dangerous for me. After a couple of painful contractions by the toilet, I laid out a couple of Chuck's pads to catch the blood and crap I was sure was coming. Yeah. So, and she writes like this about like how good it is and how important what she's doing is for the safety of her baby. And ignores the fact that her baby only survived being born four months prematurely because of intense medical intervention. Right.

Because of doctors and nurses working incredibly hard with advanced equipment to keep the baby alive. She makes it all into a story about how cool it is that she gave birth hiding alone in a bathroom without telling any of the medical professionals around her. Yeah. So this also, this movement seems among many things like a disdain for science. Like they're just like science is not cool. But you know what is cool? Yeah. My baby potentially.

The fact that I'm in control and not some doctor. Right. I mean, it's like I said, it's the anti-vaxxer thing. Right. It's just like how could this possibly help even though the ignoring the science, the facts behind it all. Wowie. Okay. Yeah.

It's pretty cool. Caitlin, it's pretty cool. I love it. Yeah. So, Paula gave herself enormous credit for cheating the system and giving birth unassisted. While ignoring the hard work of professionals, her defiant interpretation of a situation she probably made worse was interpreted as a story of self-reliance by her fellow free birthers. Instead of a cautionary tale, it reinforced dangerous ideas in the heads of dozens of women. In the years since Jeanette Frazier's baby died, the free birthing movement has grown like the old right, like the bleach drinking cult, like QAnon and like dozens of other toxic subcultures in the fertile substrate provided by Facebook.

Like every subculture, it developed its own media ecosystem with its own popular podcasts and news websites and influencers, all of whom prey upon the ever-growing market of hippie-dippy new mothers-to-be who don't trust western medicine. And that's how Judith, the subject of that viral NBC article, found out about free birthing. I'm going to quote from that article now. Judith worked at a flower shop. The daily drive was an hour outside of town, time she filled by listening to podcasts. When she got pregnant, she devoured episodes of The Birth Hour and Indie Birth, popular programs on which women shared their childbirth stories, which ranged from hospital to home births. But it was the free birth podcast that really spoke to Judith. Built as a supportive space for people who are learning, exploring, and celebrating their autonomous choices in childbirth, the podcast features Emily Saldaya, 35, a Los Angeles free birth advocate and founder of the Free Birth Society. The group has 46,000 followers on Instagram, and its podcast hit a million downloads last month. Yeah, that's too many. My podcast doesn't even get that much, and it's amazing. Not horrible propaganda.

A million downloads, a million downloads in a year. Okay. Well, yeah. The podcast beats that. Too many downloads. Too many Instagram followers. That's thousands of women potentially endangering their babies, which is great. Not great, not ideal. Robert, do you want to know what will not endanger your, I can't even vouch for this because the Bloomberg gets, I can't even vouch for this. You're absolutely supported by Mike Bloomberg. I can't even vouch for this. Actually, Sophie, I'm glad you brought that up because I have this new ad copy from Mike Bloomberg. So I'm just going to read that right now. Vote for Mike in 2020. He will endanger your babies. That's the Mike Bloomberg promise. He absolutely promises to endanger everyone's baby if elected president. And it is, in fact, the only promise he's willing to make. So, you know, a bold stance by Mike Bloomberg. You got to respect it. Well, yeah. Yeah. You heard it here, folks. That is an official Bloomberg 2020 campaign ad. Mike Bloomberg will endanger your babies.

No NDA required. No NDA required. He'll do that for free. I'm sad. All right. Here's some other ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So, we're talking about this kind of network of free birthing media circles, primarily podcasts. And this is part of, you know, Caitlin, podcasting has been good to both of us.

I make my living at it and I enjoy it. And I think I enjoy other people's podcasts that they make, including the Bechtelcast, your podcast. Thank you so much. I worry a lot about podcasts though. And this is, we're getting a little off topic, but like, if you read Mein Kampf, which everybody ought to, one of the points Adolf Hitler makes is that like, the written word essentially newspapers and books by philosophy, none of that shit convinces large amounts of people of anything. The human voice is what can change people's minds and huge numbers and shift the destinies of nations.

Like, that's what is the right voice at the right time. Saying the right things can be hypnotizing to large numbers of people. And I think that's what happens to this young woman, Judith. She's spending two, three hours a day in the car. She lives out in the sticks. She's listening to the podcast to help pass the time. And these women on this free birthing podcast, in the way that podcasting hosts become to us, become sort of like surrogate friends, and she trusts them.

And obviously she trusts these women on this podcast more than she trusts some doctors. She's going to meet a couple of times. And it's probably going to be very short on time. And like, this is one of the things that scares me about podcasts. Yeah. Yeah, I hadn't even fully, until you brought that. Yeah, I hadn't fully appreciated the power of the voice, the human voice, and how influential it can be.

That is scary. Okay, I will think on this a bit. I mean, on the lighthearted end of it, we can tell people to buy bolt cutters and the like to break into the mansions of the wealthy when society collapses. But like, on the dark side of it, all this stuff happens too. So it's really a mixed bag podcasting. Yikes. Well, didn't we learn about this with Dr. John Brinkley?

Was that his name? We sure did. Who like, founded that whole radio thing. Absolutely. And was just hawking his fake medicine to so many people. Over the radio. The only thing that's new about this is that back in the day, you know, Brinkley was only able to do that because he had a huge amount of money

from his goat ball business to establish a radio station with. Now anybody can do this. Anybody with any really fucking dumb idea can build a whole community dedicated to that dumb idea for whom that dumb idea will become more important than anything else, even the lives of their children. So continue listening to podcasts and supporting our industry. Oh, no. Oh, it's good stuff.

It's real good stuff. Everything's a nightmare. So on the free birthing podcast, Emily Saldaya hosted the most positive stories of free births. Judith was particularly taken by the tale of one woman who gave birth out in an unpowered yurt in the mountains of California with, quote, only her husband and a dog she called her mid-wolf. Oh, no.

Oh, that ruins. Dogs do not obstetricians. They're wonderful animals, but they cannot help in a birthing. No, that also just ruins puns for the rest of my life for me. I know, I know. Mid-wolf. Anderson? Mid-wolf?

To this day, I know to this day, the woman who decided to call her dog her mid-wolf, that's the thing she's proudest of is that bit of wordplay, and I hate it. Mid-wolf. I can't get over it. I'm looking at Anderson and Anderson is shaking her head going, this is not right. But this is like an aspect of this story.

A lot of these women are off the grid women, women who live on farms and stuff, who are actually probably really competent in a lot of ways, because it's hard to live that way. I have lived that way, and it's incredibly difficult, and it requires an amount of fortitude. And that's probably why women like Judith are able to go weeks past their due date and the horrible pain that that involves, because they're tough people. And there's an extent to it.

I fucking hate hospitals, and I avoid them at all goddamn costs. Same. Yes. I like living out in the middle of nowhere, and I like not relying on anyone for things of my daily necessities. I enjoy that. I understand those impulses, but when you're bringing a baby into the world, your personal level of comfort with all that matters less than the child's survival.

It just does. Yeah. That's part of being a parent, right? Is that like you put the child first? That's why I don't have a kid. That's why we've been able to perpetuate the species. Yeah. Yeah, caring for the young.

I know. I pick Robert over myself all the time, because he's my son. I know. And that's why you've got three bullets in your shoulder. I know. Wow. So few. I appreciate you jumping in between me and that California Highway Patrol officer.

But that's a story for another day and another podcast. So Judith becomes obsessed with these stories of these women having free births and these amazing and exotic low cows in the woods on top of mountains and foreign countries. She loves this stuff and listens to it every day and recalled later in NBC, I became obsessed. I would just wonder what's my story going to be like and think I want my story to be as badass as their stories. So you see, there's a level of danger here too. And the way that online communities do, everyone pushes each other more extreme.

You gave birth in an unpowered year. Well, fuck it. I'll give birth in a cave or some shit like that. So like many Americans, Judith entered into this world with a distrust of doctors. She'd been put under anesthesia as a child and found the experience frightening. As a college student, a doctor shrugged off her inner ear pain, ignoring what she thought was a real issue. Quote, just calculating all the experiences I've had with doctors, I never felt heard.

I never felt listened to. And this is an extremely common complaint from women who give birth in the United States. Very common. A lot of women will tell you, I didn't think the doctor was listening to me. I didn't feel like they cared about my pain or my situation. I mean, it's not just, I mean, listen to sludge, you guys. Listen to sludge. Listen to sludge.

Yeah, like every part of my story is that many people's stories, which is why we need such a major overhaul of the American healthcare system because it is full of a lot of medical professionals who are exhibiting certain biases against certain demographics of people, largely women, people of color, queer people, people with invisible disabilities, plus-sized people. I mean, so many groups of people are ignored or their pain isn't believed or anything like that. And it like, I can understand why certain people would be like, yeah, I don't want to deal with like the healthcare system. It's completely screwed me over.

It's completely neglected me. But I mean, so the root of the problem is this system that is so broken. And a lot of the problem is like, everything you've said is very valid. And I would add to that a lot of where these women go wrong is like, they recognize that the system's fucked up and it is. And they say like, the problem is then the doctors. We need to just not have doctors involved. And it's like, no, no, no, a big part of the problem is actually there aren't nearly enough doctors and they're all overworked. So even like the really good ones and the ones who are capable of like, you know, transcending those biases are also

just like overworked and exhausted and sleep deprived and pissed off a lot of the time. And maybe they don't give you the best bedside manner because they're they're doing way too much work. And if we had a lot more doctors, not only would you have a wider a variety of life experiences among medical professionals. And so you'd have more doctors who might understand members of these groups, but you would also have less exhausted doctors. And so they'd be able to provide better care. Right. There's so many problems with our perfect system.

What we need is for anyone who's considering starting a podcast, don't do it. There's too many become a doctor instead. Every single one of you stop listening to our podcasts and go to medical. You know how easy it is to just become a doctor. Just do that. Look, if you're listening to this podcast, where you're putting up drywall for your job as a day laborer, drop that fucking drywall hammer or whatever you used to put up drywall and go become a doctor right now, right now. This podcast's over. Yeah.

So Judith is kind of very primed by her past bad experiences with doctors to distrust doctors in the first place. So when she starts listening to this free birthing podcast and hearing its host use terms like industrial obstetric tyranny and birth rape, she was ready to to graft those words and the idea behind them onto her life. She watched the free birth society's introduction video hosted by instructor Yolanda Norris-Clark and the business partner of Emily Saldaya, the host of the free birthing podcast. And I want you to listen to how Yolanda introduces herself in this video. Sophie, that's your cue. Oh, that's my cue.

That's your cue. I'm Yolanda Clark. I'm a writer, a birth consultant, and I'm the director of education with the free birth society. And my passion and mission in life is to share the open secret that birth is not an inherently medical event, but a spontaneous function of biology and that it is the pregnant woman herself who possesses inalienable authority over her birth process. I woke up to the truth about birth almost 18 years ago. And since then, I've dedicated my life to studying birth and supporting euphoric birth. And I've given birth myself to seven healthy babies in my home without any involvement from medical professionals

at all, from conception to emergence. I like how she includes conception in there. I didn't need a doctor present when I was fucking. Yeah. Fucking is easy. It doesn't require a doctor. Clearly childbirth is the same. Right. Yeah. Look, I don't need a doctor around when I'm shooting off my guns. So why do I need a doctor when I accidentally shoot my son?

Hmm. Yeah. These wild leaps of logic are. Yeah. I also, if you, you weren't the guest for our episodes on Keith Ranieri and the Nexium Cult, but if you go back to the old videos of, what's her name? That lady who was on Smallville, Alison Mack, talking to Keith Ranieri and listen to the cadence of their voices and compare it to the cadence of Yolanda's voice, they all talk the same way with the same sort of speech patterns. And I find that very interesting. Well, okay. So to quote Hitler, yikes. To quote Hitler. I mean, you know what? There's a couple of things I'll quote Hitler on in

a sense of agreeing with him. And one of them is how to convince a bunch of people of something. He knew how to do it. He wasn't bad at that. I'm only quoting the quote that you already said from mine, but just like the power of the human voice, right? So I hope there are people out there. I know that we should probably edit this out. No, it was wonderful. You cannot edit audio. You cannot edit a human voice. So I hope there are enough people out there who can like detect those like culty like and now like the just like propaganda, yeah, that whole

cadence to pick up on the bullshit that they're spewing and listeners couldn't see, but she was doing this like almost like conductor like hand motion the entire time that was also very flowy and sway and culty. Yes. Thank you so much. Yeah. So I mean, I think, I mean, Robert, obviously you picked up on it. Like I just hope that for the people out there who like listened to all these podcasts out there and they can like, they can tell when people are being scary and spewing propaganda bullshit. And I hope that they understand that when I tell them to purchase bolt cutters and okay.

So later in that video, Yolanda warns against inducing labor, calling it an eviction from the womb and basically arguing that it's traumatic to the infant. She brags about taking her pregnancies well past the normal 40 weeks. And Yolanda's eyes, the idea that the risk of stillbirths rises rapidly after 42 weeks is nonsense. She states, babies come out babies always come out. So when Judith's pregnancy crept past 42 weeks, she assured herself it was fine by remembering Yolanda's words. She also sought reinforcement from her friends in the free birthing Facebook group. Things were not fine, of course, and her baby was in fact stillborn. The only good

news in this terrible story is that this horrific tragedy shocked Judith out of the weird little internet cult she'd gotten drawn into. As she told NBC, I think I brainwashed myself with the internet. And that's what happened. The internet, like, the fact that Judith was capable of realizing this and acknowledging the bad decisions that set her on this path should key you in on the critical fact that she's not a dumb person. She's a person who did a dumb thing with a horrible consequence. But she herself is an intelligent, capable, reasonable human being. The internet made her stupid. This doesn't take away from her culpability in the tragedy, and she definitely has quite a lot here. But it does highlight

a critical reality. Without this massive ecosystem, totaling tens of thousands of people and hundreds of dedicated content creators, Judith would not have been able to convince herself to make these bad decisions. This just wouldn't have happened in an age in which this internet infrastructure didn't exist. The train of things that led to Judith's stillbirth bears tremendous similarities to the radicalization pathway for numerous neo-Nazi and white supremacist terrorists. Some dumb kid comes across a really transgressive podcast or review of a movie they like by some YouTuber like Stefan Malanou. And that leads them to other content and eventually a more extreme communities. And after a few months or a few years, you've

got yourself a committed white supremacist. And as is the case with all these neo-Nazis we're dealing with in 2020, there are specific individuals to blame for creating the radicalization pathways in the free birthing community. The internet may have made Judith stupid, but it didn't do so on its own. And the two people most responsible for the spread of the free birthing movement and its modern deadly dimensions are Emily Saldaya and Yolanda Norris-Clark. They wind up in every single one of these stories. Take the case of Lisa, a 29-year-old Californian who talked to the Daily Beast. Lisa had been living off the grid in an eco-friendly sort of situation

in the middle of nowhere when she found a free birthing page on Instagram. The idea immediately appealed to her, and she joined the free birthing Facebook group that Emily Saldaya ran. Like Judith, she kept her new friends up to date with her pregnancy. Quote, been in labor for days, thought I was in transition at 11.30pm, but now it's 3am and it's intensely painful, like I just want to lie down and for the pain to stop for a second. Saldaya reached out to her via Facebook Messenger to give support. Other group mirrors left comments like, you're a legend, it will happen. Like Justine, Lisa's pregnancy went on for far too long. Her baby was also born dead. She made a quick post to the Free Birth Society's Facebook group,

and people there sympathized with her, but the important work of radicalizing other pregnant women to avoid hospitals and even midwives continued, or at least it would have, if not for what happened next. And I'm going to quote from the Daily Beast again here. A group of concerned outsiders, worried the free birthers were being reckless, had set up fake sock puppet accounts to gain entry to the private group and monitor its members. The interlopers saw themselves as sentries, keeping watch over alternative lifestyle practitioners they believed were putting their babies in harm. The sock puppets took screenshots of Lisa's comments and posted them in their own groups, sparking instant outcry from their

followers. Some of them marveled at why anyone would take such a risk with a pregnancy, while others blamed Saldaya for luring impressionable women into a dangerous practice. Others were more vicious. The twat from the Free Birth Society needs drop kicking out of a fucking window, one person wrote. I wouldn't mind seeing this monster swinging from a light post added another. So that's all the internet that you and I know and love, Kaitlyn. These eruptions of death threats and outrage by anti-free birthing activists came to follow every new dead baby story. When Baby Journey Moon died in 2018, the weight of attention and outrage leveled against the Free Birth Society caused Emily Saldaya to close all

four of her Facebook groups. Dear community, it is with a heavy heart that we officially announce the closing of our four wonderful groups here on Facebook. As of November 1st, all members will be removed and the groups closed permanently. As many of you know, a member of our private Free Birth Society group tragically lost her baby during the birth process earlier this year. The painful reality is that babies do sometimes die in all settings including the hospital and every pregnant woman was content with the possibility of death, which exists for each of us. Babies just die. Emily went on to complain about her own death threats, the ones that she'd received from anti-free birthing activists

and closed the post by announcing, in light of all this, we at Free Birth Society are advancing our plan to move off Facebook to a safe and private membership platform. Yeah, that's actually exactly what they're doing. It's not Patreon, but that's exactly the goal. This is a grift. The private membership platform is not free. It costs $108 to be a member. And since her Facebook group had more than 6,000 members when she closed it down, the amount of money on the line here is potentially significant. And that's not the whole of the grift. It's barely the start. Emily and Yolanda run a website, FreeBirthSociety.com. On it, you can buy a coffee table book. She Rises, an annual edition of The Wild Mother,

which is another thing these people call themselves, for just $29.99. You can also pay for a number of different cool services, Caitlin. You're going to love hearing about this. There's the Lighthouse Leaders Group Coaching Series from $175, Birth Trauma Debrief for $150, Radical Birth Keeper Consultation for $100, Self-Mastery Coaching for $150, and Undisturbed Birth Education and Prep for $150. Now, I bet you're wondering, what is Radical Birth Keeper Consultation? I am wondering that. Please tell me. I looked into it, and it turns out it's a guide for other women to start their own business in the Radical Birth Work field. How is there a market for that?

Well, because these ladies are making bank. Emily and Yolanda are making a ton. Who wouldn't want to make money off of this? It's like making money as a midwife, but with all of that pesky training and apprenticeship and learning useful medical shit. Oh, good God. Here's a quote from the page for that thing. New to birth work? Not sure where to start? Or maybe you've been attending births for a while and you're feeling sick. If you're called to Radical Birth Work, identified by us as standing with and for women, we are here to help you brainstorm business ideas and dive into all things birth work. We have effectively coached many women who want to

launch their birth businesses, but don't know where to start or feel stymied by the pressures that they perceive from general social climate around birth or worry as to what and how to charge for their services. During the session, we will help you cut through the noise of self-judgment and help you clarify your birth work superpower and project your vision to the world, implement your passion, and translate it into working with women with the highest integrity. This is a 60-minute session that will be done over FaceTime or Zoom. Okay, so let me understand this. So they are basically, they are for the service where

you can consult with someone to learn how to be a person who will be present at free births just to help out in case anything goes wrong. So they acknowledge the need for people to be there. Just not people with actual medical experience. Medical training. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay.

This is kind of where I start to see it as, I don't think, like Justine obviously, the one we've talked about the most, there was no grift for her. She just thought this was the best thing to do and she was wrong. But these women, Yolanda, Emily Saldaya and Yolanda Norris Clark, these are people who just want the respect and money that a real professional like a midwife or a doctor receives as a result of what they do, but they don't want to take any training or get any kind of license or be told by anyone that whatever crazy ideas they have about birth aren't like right. So they've just built up this community where they're treated like real medical professionals and essentially train other people in how

to give birth without actually knowing how to train other people. Train people how to give birth with no, like train people to not be trained. Yeah. It's mind boggling. It's incredible. And if you decide, Caitlin, that you want comprehensive coaching on how to free birth your own baby, Emily and Yolanda will be more than happy to help you for a purpose. Their full coaching package is a bargain at just $899. Oh my God.

Oh, fuck yeah. Well, I have decided that I want their help, so I'm going to start saving up. Yeah. Midwives have to like go to a place. You just give it on Skype, baby. That's the way easier. Oh my God. Now, I can't say for certain that Lisa, one of the mothers whose babies died, was actively paying Yolanda and Emily for birth coaching, but the fact that she mentions getting Facebook messages from Saldaya makes me think that she was. And the precise wording of how the

Daily Beast discussed this is suspicious to me, quote, Saldaya says she provided no advice to Lisa and never even spoke to her on the phone. She doesn't mean she didn't get on Skype for Zoom or something. Okay, so a different medium maybe then. Yeah, maybe. I found Yolanda Norris-Clarke on Facebook and Instagram. She goes by Bauhauswife and sends out free birthing memes and updates to her combined 12,000 followers. Here's one example. The idea that governments could ever have the legitimate jurisdiction to designate birth

workers or license birth work in any capacity should be preposterous and outrageous to everyone. The fact that it isn't and that so many women especially have accepted and even welcomed the appropriation of midwifery by the patriarchal false authority of the official institutions just reinforces the task that we have at hand to rewild and reauthenticate our relationship to ourselves, to motherhood, to our bodies, to our children, and to each other. Hashtag radical birth keeper, hashtag radical birth work, hashtag Bauhauswife, hashtag free birth, hashtag home birth, hashtag wild birth, hashtag free birth society, hashtag free birth society, radical birth keeper school, hashtag radical birth keeper school, hashtag free

birth society. Okay, so these are like the terfs of the birthing community. Yeah, these are birth terfs. They're like, you were so right before when you said they were co-opting certain language in terms of pro-choice language, but then they've just taken it to this horribly harmful radical yikes. She has her own branded means. One of them reads, governments have no business in birth. Birth belongs to women. Yeah, but not when your baby dies because you like ignore science.

Yeah, the baby has some rights too at the point at which it's coming out. Now, this kind of language is powerfully effective to the women who wind up in these groups. Studies have been done on the free birthing community in the US and Australia, and four key things come up over and over again when women say how they found this community. And I'm quoting from a paper commissioned by Evidence-Based Midwifery, so this is a midwives-like organization. Rejection of the medical and midwifery models of birth, faith in the birth process, autonomy and agency. There was a prevailing sense of choosing to free birth in order to retain choice control and autonomy over their bodies during the birth process. It's about control.

Another analysis I found on the conversation backs up this interpretation, quote, where home birth services were available, some women did not want the routine care that is provided by midwives. This was largely due to the belief that routine care practices would cause interference that would get in the way of their ability to birth safely. Additionally, they were concerned that they may face coercion should they decline aspects of care provided by the midwives. Therefore they did not want care imposed upon them during childbirth. The researchers findings across all studies agreed that women ought to retain full control and autonomy throughout their experience of giving birth. A need they felt maternity services were unable to meet.

Yeah. Because, Ken, you can't. You don't own the baby once it's coming out. It's not your property. It's a thing. It's like it's leaving. It's getting on out of there. Yeah. Oh gosh. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

I mean, you hate to see it where they're like, yes, women's autonomy and agency and absolutely. Because these are things I so strongly agree with, but they've just taken it to this horrible, horrible place. Oh, no. They really do. It rules. I don't enjoy getting a pap smear, but I'm not going to do it to myself because I don't fucking know how. Yeah. I have given myself a pap smear, but I don't know what a pap smear is, so I just kind of,

you know. Robert, may I explain to you what a pap smear is? I think that the reality of that situation, Caitlin, is between me and my hammer. I'll let you look at it. I'm pretty sure I'm good at it. It's unpleasant to say the least. I'm starting the self-smear community, actually, online. Oh, the free smearing, free smears.

Yeah. A lot of people say men cannot get and give themselves pap smears using hammers, but my Facebook group says otherwise. Well, as long as babies are not dying, I guess that's what's important here. No. No babies dying. Some people. Some people are dying.

Some adults. Yeah. Now, the sad reality is that more and more babies are going to keep dying as a result of the free birthing movement. Emily Saldaya and Yolanda Norris-Clark will continue podcasting and memeing and making bank while America's infant mortality rate ticks ever higher. The NBC article that came out earlier this year helped to highlight the movement, but in the end, it may just draw more women into the movement's maw.

That's certainly what Emily Saldaya thinks. In the immediate wake of the NBC article, which was focused around the death of a child from someone who followed Emily's instructions to a tee, she posted this on Instagram. Hey guys! No podcast this week. Decided to prioritize self-care and create some spaciousness to relax and be fully present with my baby after an insane month of working my ass off on this membership launch. I'm extremely proud of what we've built and it feels so good to be off Facebook.

Thank you for the outpouring of love and support I've received in this hard as fuck past six weeks. Someday when I'm ready, I will talk at length about my experience on this full-on cyber-attack, but for now it's only furthered by resolve in this work. Truth and light will always shine brighter and carry more endurance. And in the words of Lena Dunham, no one that actually knows me thinks I'm an asshole, and that's what matters. When you know and love who you are, you're unshakable.

The bright side of all this weird media attention is it's brought a ton of women to this movement. So fuck yes to transmuting people's traumatized shit energy into something powerful and exciting. Big bicep emoticon, fist emoticon. And to all the haters out here that have gotten weirdly obsessed with me, I still get all the love in my heart for you, and I will keep fighting for you, whether you're with me or not. Fire emoticon, heart emoticon, heart emoticon, heart emoticon, heart emoticon, heart emoticon, heart emoticon.

Hashtag Freebirth Society, hashtag the Freebirth Podcast, hashtag haters gonna hate, strong women, hashtag smash the patriarchy, hashtag calling bullshit, hashtag light wins, hashtag I am not afraid, hashtag strong as fuck, hashtag Lena Dunham you inspire me, hashtag bye-bye Facebook. Lena Dunham you inspire me. Women are taking advice on their baby's health care from this person. That's so scary. Also, if I, if it like, if I, I can't even speak.

It's amazing. It's fucking astonishing. I'm so flabbergasted. I think if I, if like, if my feminism ever inspired like Freebirthers to be like, yeah, smash the patriarchy, I will, I don't know what I will do. I will have to just like, log off and never be present in the world again. Like, if my message somehow gets convoluted to like this version of scary radical Freebirth feminism, uh, horrifying.

Yeah. Yeah. You don't have to give birth in a hospital, but you do have to consult medical professionals about your birth to do so responsibly. Yeah. Uh, cause when you decide you're bringing a baby into the world, it's not all about you anymore. Um, but it is all about you when you're performing a home pap smear as a man.

And that's why you should join my Facebook group, man smearing, where we're teaching each other how to recapture pap smearing from the medical industrial establishment and the feminist establishment and remail and rewild pap smears for all of the men who have access to Home Depot hammers. I don't even know how to respond to that, Caitlyn. Um, I will say this, if what, wouldn't it be funny if there were like MRAs out there who were like, um, men should be able to get pap smears too, and then, and then they like go on by a speculum or sorry, a hammer and a hammer.

Yes. The male pap smear is performed with a hammer. I see. Um, well, I just, I just keep going, I just, I keep going back to like one of the roots of the problem that births, the free birth movement, see what I did there, mid-wolf, okay, um, is the broken American healthcare system. And if we just find a way to fix that, uh, I feel like there would, there would never be a need of any, any, you know, mothers to feel the need to have a free birthing experience.

Um, so that, I mean, I mean, we, gosh, I feel sick. Well, if you're feeling sick, that means it's the perfect time to plug your pluggables because nothing cures your ailments like a solid plug. Thank you. Uh, well, I'll start with a sludge in American healthcare story, uh, my podcast about, uh, my experience finding out that I had gallstones and the very long and arduous process that it took for me to get surgery to get them taken out. Uh, so check out that.

And I can't. It's amazing. I'm so happy. Uh, I keep, um, saying, yeah, I'm releasing season two soon and I don't know when that's going to happen, but, uh, it'll happen someday. But season two focuses on other people's, uh, medical nightmare stories. Excellent. So, uh, we're big fans of medical nightmares here.

Yeah. I mean, I, I want, I, I really have my mom on what I will. Sure. Yeah. I'll have anyone on. If anyone has a medical, that's the other thing. If people have medical horror stories, um, please email them. Um, to me at sludge story podcast at gmail.com, um, I'll probably feature them on the podcast.

Again, when I start releasing episodes someday, um, yeah, I just, I want to have faith in a healthcare system. Um, it just needs to be very much revamped. So, um, yeah, let's work on that a society. Anyway, um, you can listen to my less of a bummer podcast, the Bechtelcast, which is also still kind of a bummer sometimes cause it's all about how, um, moot, most movies are horrible to women. Um, so, you know, sometimes they're not though and those episodes are nice.

Um, and then you can follow me on, uh, Twitter and Instagram at Caitlyn Durante. Um, and, uh, yeah, I think that's, that's about it. Yay. You can find me on the internet at manschmearing.com and the manschmearing Facebook group where we talk about how to reclaim our, wherever you do that, uh, from doctors and the, the feminatriarchy. Um, that's, that's it. The end of the episode.

So what Robert meant to say is he's at I right okay on Twitter or at bastard spot on Twitter and Instagram. We have a tea public store. Robert also hosts Worcester ever, uh, I have Twitter. Yes. I've actually never, I've actually never said it out loud. It's why underscore Sophie underscore why Anderson content. That's it.

Okay. So why Sophie? Why? Okay. And then it's all because you're a professional. Okay. So Sophie Ray Lecterman at, on Twitter at why underscore Sophie underscore why? And then it features Anderson content.

I thought the whole handle for a second was, yeah, I'm not a professional like you. I'm a hack and a fraud. No, you're not. All right. That's the fucking episode. Alpha Bet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations in the first season. We're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse with like a lot of guns, but our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alpha Bet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space?

Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.