Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births – now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world

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

The first woman known to have lost her baby after following Saldaya’s advice was Lorren Holliday. When she got pregnant in 2018, she interviewed midwives, but couldn’t afford the $5,000 downpayment for their services. Reluctantly, she resigned herself to the hospital, until, scrolling through Instagram one day, she found FBS: “What they offered was exactly what I was looking for.” A friendly animal lover with short pink hair, Holliday lives in a trailer on an acre of land in the Arizona desert with her husband, Chris, their three barefoot children and 35 dogs, cats, ducks, goats, chickens and turkeys. “I wanted health. I wanted natural.”

She began bingeing the podcast and joined Saldaya’s FBS Facebook group. A freebirth, Holliday believed, would give her baby the most gentle start to life.

Holliday was in her Airstream caravan when her contractions began on 1 October 2018. She was 41 weeks pregnant. By day three she realised they “weren’t spread out any more. It was like one long contraction.” Holliday began messaging Saldaya for advice. “The pain is unbearable … I just want to know if I’m not progressing,” she wrote on 4 October. She said she’d been vomiting, and explained a pattern of contractions that would have rung alarm bells for a medical professional. Saldaya said the pain was not unbearable – thinking of it that way “is a dead end – or a path to hospital birth”. She added, “You’ll have to die 1000 deaths and let go of everything that you think you can’t do.”

On the evening of 6 October 2018, after six days of active labor – unheard of in a medically managed birth – Holliday sent Saldaya a photograph of luminous green meconium. The following day, Saldaya asked for an update. Holliday said the baby wasn’t moving much and she hadn’t been able to urinate for 24 hours. Saldaya said she would go to hospital at this point, but suggested she may want to lie to doctors about when her water broke. She sent her a script to deceive medics.

At the hospital, Holliday learned her daughter was dead. Journey Moon had dark hair like her father. Holliday doesn’t know what color her eyes would have been, but she likes to imagine they were blue.

After Journey Moon died, the Daily Beast reported on the case. At Saldaya’s request, Holliday lied to the journalist, saying Saldaya didn’t advise her during her birth, and Saldaya said she’d provided no advice. “We tweaked,” Holliday says bitterly, “that little interview.”

Both Saldaya and Holliday received hate mail after the article was published. “I wanted the best for Journey Moon,” Holliday says of her decision to freebirth. “That’s why I stuck it out so long, to give her the best birth possible. When people started calling me selfish and greedy, that killed me, because I did it for her.”