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Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births – now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world
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- Authors
- Sirin Kale, Lucy Osborne
- Published
- Nov 22 2025
- Word count
- 18 238 words
Every time I see some "natural" or "homeopathic" medicine pop up as "preferable" to modern medicine, I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes:
I don't mean to dunk on natural remedies, they have their place. But there's a reason neonatal mortality during childbirth has dropped roughly 90% since the advent of modern medicine.
While I like that sentiment, I think that there is a real problem with Western medicine and how they (don't) listen to women, and how they treat patients. Those problems really open the door to alternative options like the free birth society. I feel like everyone knows or at least knows of a woman who was ignored by her doctor when she went in for pain, and was told it was related to her period, and it ended up being very serious and unrelated.
This is the natural end result; when you treat patients poorly, they will seek alternatives. And many (maybe all) alternatives to Western medicine have worse outcomes, but the process of getting to the outcomes feels better.
I saw someone post this article with the following points and the post really resonated with me
Reproductive rights aren't just about abortions. Hospitals make births so much safer but they also can make things more painful and more difficult when giving birth in favor of making the doctors' lives easier. And some of the rules of "explaining what you're doing to the patient" and "you have a right to understand your care" seem to go out the window in obstetrics.
This tracks with my experience as a woman, but I've noticed is especially flagrant among friends and family going through perimenopause/menopause. Every single one of these women has a complaint that has been dismissed by their doctors. They've all been told some form of "well that's menopause for ya so you just have to deal with it". Yet hormone replacement therapy exists and even something as simple as progesterone/estrogen/testosterone creams would go a long way to treating what ails them. Each one of them has turned to supplements, chinese medicine, homeopathy, etc because they're desperate and have no other options.
You said it... If I could beat the doctor who told me "it's just perimenopause" with a stick, I might, and I'm a pretty non-violent person. Dr. Dimwit ignored some indicative lab results, and prescribed SSRIs. I suffered for a couple of years of trying every soy product, supplement with any evidence behind it, CBT, exercise... leading to joint replacements that could have been avoided.
Not a hormonal problem, either. It's just that the perimenopausal/early menopausal age range is the second commonest age range for autoimmune disease onset in women. Doctors don't bother to investigate aches and fatigue in women going through perimenopause/menopause beyond "live with it" until the symptoms are impossible to miss, from everything I've read on the RA boards.
It's hard to believe in the power of medical science when it's not being applied appropriately to members of your gender at the most significant transition points in their lives. There's not a single female-gendered person of my acquaintance (I'm including transwomen and NB-AFABs) who doesn't have a medical abuse story - ignored, demeaned, mistreated, treated without informed consent, misdiagnosed (usually with an inappropriate mental health diagnosis), assaulted...
I am so fortunate that once I figured out what was going on, my nurse practitioner gp was incredibly helpful and kind. She gave me all the options and asked me how I wanted to manage it. I was also fortunate that the reddit community is so incredibly helpful, their wiki contains all the options, pros and cons, and as many answers to "why" as are available. They also have links to papers backing up all the info. I had no idea this could start on my 40's until all of my similarly aged friends seemed to go on medication at what felt like the same time.
So many of the natural life processes for women are couched in shame. Still firmly in this taboo are miscarriages, nursing, and menopause, which makes information hard to come by unless you know to ask. I gave my gp my sincere thanks once she got me straightened out in a way I could live with, I told her that I went into it expecting to have issues like everyone else does but she was nothing but helpful.
I think of medicine in three "branches":
The disparities you address are very valid. I would classify most of them under the "access" branch. No one -- women, people of color, non-English speakers, whatever -- no one should have reduced access to medicine. Either through barriers such as insurance, or bias from a healthcare provider causing the patient to "not be heard". On this note, I could not agree more.
But on the topics of techniques and application, modern medicine has done so much to improve the lives of those who use it, across all demographics.
Don't get me wrong, there are still barriers there. For example, a lack of techniques leading to a lack of applications in populations whose disparities are unknown or de-prioritized for whatever reason, such as pain in women historically being mismanaged due to a bias that "they're just soft, not really in pain".
But on the whole, while there is absolutely room for improvement, I see the trend that medicine continues to try and "do better" year after year. Sometimes not as fast as it should for specific populations. But definitely in an upward trend.
I like the branches that you have defined, but I think that there is a lot of benefit in thinking of these things as a pipeline. I would consider the health pipeline to be something like this:
Access leads to Service leads to Outcomes.
The problems with modern medicine tend not to be so much in Service, or what you've called Techniques and Application; those are usually based in science and consistently are improving over time (let's ignore RFK Jr for now). And this modern medicine Service does tend to lead to the best Outcomes. I'm certainly not arguing with that.
But difficult to access services is one of the primary problems, and it can be for a variety of reasons - doctors don't listen, insurance disallows a service, etc. - and that's the biggest thing that leads to people seeking alternatives. And this dissatisfaction with Access can lead to a distrust of the entire medical profession, which leads to anti-science views.
I should maybe disclaim that my wife does her primary research on access to service, specifically in Speech Language Pathology and Rehabilitation but with general application to all medicine. While her interests are generally more about access issues for parents of children with disabilities, the model does still hold for other types of access. But it's notable that I did not make up the terms above, but stole them directly from her.
I want to chime in here like most other folks, that while I disagree with alternative medicine often times that's exactly what it is - the alternative for when western medicine isn't working out. As others have said there are so many reasons why people decide to opt out of the system. Since the article talks about birthing I'll stick to that.
In the US, c-sections don't necessarily track directly with need or emergency. They are also influenced by financial implications and the doctor's dinnertime. That means we see some of the highest rates of unplanned c-sections, even when they aren't medically required. That creates distrust and a sense that what is happening to you is being done for financial gain or convenience. All during one of the most impactful, painful, and vulnerable moments of your life. My wife is pregnant and boy the horror stories come out of the woodwork. So while we'll be having the birth at the hospital, I can understand those who opt out. It's a big freaking risk - one that we aren't taking - but I get the mindset.
I think if our whole medical system didn't feel quite so much like everything was being done to minimize cost to insurance and maximize payout to medical groups then this stuff wouldn't be an issue. My mom works in healthcare and I credit her for the fact that I know how to navigate it well. Even with that insider knowledge I've had horrible outcome with our system. I tore my achilles and it took 2 months and 4 doctor visits to go from initial diagnosis at urgent care (which was correct: torn achilles) to actually seeing a podiatrist and getting treatment. I had misdiagnosed duputrens for 5 years because an MRI was "medically unnecessary". I had a parasite I was told I "could not possibly have living in California" even when repeatedly telling them I had been working abroad in an area with high infection rates - only to finally shit the whole thing out when I got Flagyl in Mexico. I mean I could genuinely go on and on and on. And that is from a very fit, generally healthy person from ages 20-35. I'm not even in a high risk category or having high risk events.
I think in the US the default is to blame the individual. "How could this person be so dumb?" But so often I think these are externalities of a fucked system. There are some really amazing techniques and revolutionary medicine coming out of the west, there are great people who work in these places, AND we live in a system designed to optimize for finances not outcomes. And when that last part is true it's hard to trust that you'll get access to the first two.
For a very good example of this, listen to season 2 of The Retrievals podcast: https://www.nytimes.com/article/serial-the-retrievals.html
Yeah, I try to remind people that the ‘natural’ way is to die from things like smallpox and childbirth, but it gets me nowhere. Cant argue with these people.
It's perpetually perplexing to me that so many people still fall into the "natural == good or harmless" trap. My go-to counter to it is "hemlock tea is all-natural, too; ask Socrates how well his dose treated him."
I reckon it comes from the deep-seated fear many people have for any form of complexity. It's no surprise to me that things like young earth creationism, flat eartherism and anti-vaxx have found each other such agreeable bedfellows; all of them are reactionary responses to an ever-complexifying world.
I think its literally just the propaganda at this point. People would get vaccines if the Youtubers told them to instead of telling them vaccines are poison.
I know that this group of people generally doesnt go to the doctor at all, but vaccines werent usually an issue before Youtube became a thing.
I see the confusion of "natural" for "healthy" all over the damn place, not just in anti-vaxx MAGA-y circles. It's been a marketing buzzword for decades, because it works.
When it comes to the reactionaries I spoke of in my last paragraph, I think your propaganda notion comes close, but is incomplete. Propaganda alone doesn't convince people that everything they've ever been told is a lie; you or I could probably watch a ton of Nazi or Stalinist propaganda and not come away as ardent supporters of Der Führer or the Man of Steel.
Propaganda needs the right soil to take root, and in our culture, that soil was tilled by decades of worsening wealth consolidation, regulatory inaction (or the downright sabotage of regulatory power), and social institutions that prop up belief as being superior to investigation and inquiry. Of course, the pressures that've led us here are multi-faceted, intricate and contingent, and are beyond the capability of any individual to fully understand, much less control. It shouldn't surprise us that some people find worldviews that offer to reduce the complexities of the world into pat generalities appealing, even if those generalities are so oversimplified as to trip into delusion. Fascism makes these people an offer: hand over your agency to us, and we'll simplify the world, flatten it out into a nice neat plane so you always know where you stand.
It's a lie, of course, but there's a small grain of truth to the deal in that it does give its adherents a sort of power: not over the dangerous complexities of the world, but over other people who insist on acknowledging those complexities. That's why trolling and rhetorical dirty pool are so central to their programme: that's the real tangible reward for the True Believers. Sure, their problems won't ever get solved, but at least they get the consolation prize of driving those of us who recognize the contingent complexities of the world into conniptions by dumbly refusing to acknowledge them.
With regard to obstetrics, things used to be much worse in terms of doctors ignoring women's comfort and autonomy.
But the medical skepticism is also influenced by a general history of major betrayals/regulatory failures like the thalidomide disaster and the tuskeegee syphilis experiment. A whole generation of people in Utah and Nevada had greater cancer prevalence thanks to above ground nuclear testing. The New York city government and environmental regulators told the public that the dust from the fallen World Trade center towers wasn't a major risk and that masks etc were not needed.
A healthy skepticism is actually warranted but people don't know how to distinguish corrupt spokespeople from sincere practitioners from charlatans. And the influencers and social media make it worse.
I think it's important to acknowledge that you don't even need outright corruption and incompetence to explain a lot of this sort of issue. The fact that the world and society are complex and somewhat chaotic is sufficient to explain a great many things.
Above-ground nuclear testing is one such example: the military, political and scientific men who made that call were trying to balance the health and well-being of the citizenry against geopolitical strategy and the dangers presented by the inexorable march of scientific "progress." I don't believe that anyone involved in making those decisions was a Captain Planet villain who just wanted to salt the Mojave with strontium for the thrill of the thing–they were fallible, finite individuals tasked with making decisions on behalf of an enormous nation, and, in their minds at least, for the protection of the world.
That's not to absolve them of their bad decisions. It's vital to scrutinize the motives and reasoning behind every big, earth-moving decision, especially when outcomes turn out as deleterious and Pyrrhic as those from the nuclear arms race. However, we should take the effort to remind ourselves that this impulse to oversimplify and flatten out the world doesn't just reside in those people who've adopted absurd ideologies, or trashed the joint in pursuit of questionable goals, it exists in all of us. It lurks as much behind the cynicism regarding capitalism among disaffected progressives as it does the cynicism regarding medical science from the crunchy granola and neo-fascist crowds.
I reckon that urge to flatten out motivations and assign unrealistic agency to individuals is of a kind with that of the science deniers and fascie fanatics; the main difference and virtue of the progressive sort is that it tends toward greater nuance and consideration, and as a consequence probably hits a little closer to the mark.
Alright, I'm gonna swing this one out cause you kinda seem like you know what I'm talking about.
There are long term consequences for losing a civil war, and no one wants to talk about this shit. The entire previously confederate states lived in actual freaking squalor and are dead last in just about every single measurable category (except for Mississippi education as of like this past year hell yea good for them)
And like, instead of the federal government being like 'oh, this whole entire region needs extra help because we literally demolished them, took away most people's wealth, etc etc etc' they seem to just keep punishing the south because the south's way of "fixing" the issue was continuing to put down the Black population because they thought somehow if Black people were just, the way they used to be, it'd somehow magically be fixed.
We need help, federal help, and instead Trump just seems to be putting salt in the wound whenever we get wrecked by a hurricane, and they somehow STILL don't see it because the democrats want to help the black people too and that's just like, unacceptable for some reason, so they keep voting for the people that'll make it worse.
Anyway, my point is like, I kinda wish someone up there would run on the platform of helping the south. Cause the fed programs that exist suck, the states keep voting against anything that'd help, and its because the people who need the help think it'll go to black people so they vote against it and I have no idea how to fix that.
The abandonment of Reconstruction is the greatest failure in the history of the United States, and probably like its fourth greatest shame (we've got some doozies in that category).
I got no answers here either, but I hear you, and you aren't wrong.
I don't think this is really true, at least as a generalization. Georgia, Florida, Texas, Virginia have had high levels of economic development in recent decades. Tennessee, South Carolina, and North Carolina are also doing fine.
It's mainly Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana of the "Deep South" which are in the underdevelopment death spiral. But so too is Wyoming and Montana and Idaho and New Mexico.
I took the hyperbole to be a symptom of frustration regarding a subject so little discussed that we haven't even bothered to formulate a proper taboo against mentioning it. I also don't think it's accurate to imply that the Federal government is continuing to punish the former Confederate states specifically for the rebellion. Again, the world and country are sufficiently complex that you don't need to resort to assigning retributive agency to "the government."
But as I read @snake_case's argument, the thesis is that a large chunk (at least) of the former Confederate states are locked in a political and economic vicious cycle fueled in part by racial resentments and a tradition of defiance to Federal action just on principle. I judge that to be accurate, more or less, and agree that we'd all be much better off if we could somehow process all that history in some kind of nation-state analogue of therapy.
Those states are fine if you only look at the cities, but the small towns are falling farther and farther behind.
Most everyone is faced with the decision of move to the city and be surrounded by liberals or stay put and hope voting for Trump will help (spoilers, it wont, because he’s a grifter)
Basically every single town outside the major cities is subsidized by federal welfare. Theres no attempt from anyone to spur any economic development, and at this point even if you wanted to move closer to the city to find a better job you could never afford it cause the house + land you own is only worth like 40k and thats not even enough for a downpayment on a house in the city for a mortgage which you wouldn’t qualify for without a job anyway. Not that you’d ever consider moving, you’ve lived here your whole life, you’re like 50-70 years old and you hate the city.
Whats especially interesting is that these people make up a massive voting block, enough to swing elections apparently, and all they keep doing is voting against themselves because they think all the rotten politics Trump wants to pass will only affect immigrants.
I have a side bet in my head that Trump will cut the programs these people depend on and they’ll be forced to cut their losses and move to the city anyway.
That’s not really a confederate/union phenomena or south/north. Everywhere in the US, and the world really, rural areas are becoming depopulated and urbanization is increasing.
It’s true in California and New York too.
To some extent it just is what it is. In an increasingly service and knowledge based economy, cities are just much better suited to amplify its advantages. Meanwhile, just having more land doesn’t really do all that much.
But moreover my point is that it’s orthogonal to the Deep South and its confederate legacy.
It's not my experience that this group doesn't go to the doctor. They do look for doctors who will enable them, but we're not talking about the Amish - whose views on vaccines I don't know and who I see at hospitals often enough - often folks are trying a mix of medical and non-medical treatments. And the anti-vax movement certainly changed after Jenny McCarthy but I think that's the actual pivot point rather than YouTube which is much more of a conspiracy theory factor now than in 2007. Things were just shared on forums and websites instead of via video.
Where I live in the SE US most people don’t have health insurance, they’re small business owners or contractors, a lot of them work gig jobs. All the corporate jobs are in the city and require a bachelors and most of these people are from here and never left.
Its also a generational thing, they never went to doctors as a kid unless they were dying, because it was expensive.
So these people don’t really know how medical care works, were suddenly exposed to a bunch of conservative Youtubers telling them vaccines are poison, and here we are.
I’m sure its different in different places, this is just where I live.
I grew up in the Midwest and only went to the doctor once that I can remember (for a broken bone) until I joined the military. One of the things I'm grateful to the military for is teaching me to go to the doctor when I need to. I actually went to basic training with strep throat I'd had for weeks, I had no idea you could get that taken care of so easily.
If I felt too sick to work I had to go to the doctor and get a note. I had to get an annual exam. I would have died long ago from mono, strep, or a kidney infection if I hadn't felt that medical care was an option.
Yes exactly! This is how people actually freaking live down here it's insanity. The coffee shop barista once had a literally bloody eye, I think a vessel popped when she was sleeping, and we were like, um you should probably get that checked out you could go blind and she was like, you mean go to the doctor????
Insanity.
Has the ACA made an impact on that at all?
I agree that it makes a difference on where you live though. My Appalachian ancestors worked in the coal mines so for better or worse they (eventually) had healthcare before mostly moving away over the years.
Still lost a great uncle to tetanus at the age of 5 and don't know how great grandpa lost his leg, just that his draft card said it was missing
The ACA sounds so much better than the reality is. I'm getting set up to use it now for the first time, the options are all so much worse and more expensive than what I had while working.
Unfortunately you're coming in at a low - and very expensive - point due to the "Big" spending bill. Employers subsidizing healthcare definitely hides the cost, and then when the government decides to stop subsidizing the marketplace, people end up screwed.
But yes, I've been lucky to have good corporate and now state employee healthcare, there are definitely worse employer plans that at least used to make the marketplace more appealing, but now, I'm not sure how it pans out.
Good luck
Nah it really hasn't, no one here even knows how to sign up for ACA. They think it's actually called Obamacare and you just somehow get it for free when you're homeless or something.
Even if they did know how to actually apply for it, they'd never do it out of pride.
I think if you think vaccines weren't an issue before YouTube became a thing, you really just are not very familiar with these people at all. Wakefield's first big "vaccines cause autism" paper was published in 1998 and it entered the public consciousness as a big thing in the early 2000s before YouTube even existed at all. I didn't get flu shots growing up even though even by the time YouTube did exist for my mother to watch, she didn't watch it -- and she still doesn't, to my knowledge.
There are absolutely other ways that this misinformation spreads and has spread for a long time. A lot of it is very based on word-of-mouth through in-person community (my mom got many of her bad recommendations from women at church). If I were to blame a particular social media source here, it would probably be Facebook rather than YouTube or Tiktok, as Facebook is much more designed to amplify this same effect and used to be more popular among the demographics mainly into this stuff. Facebook Groups are an absolute haven for this sort of thing afaik. But it's also extremely possible to get sucked into this with very little to no social media use at all, especially in certain preexisting social circles.
Also, most of the "alternative medicine" fans I've encountered absolutely go to the hospital. In fact, they often go more often than most people, since often undiagnosed or inadequately treated chronic illness is a big factor in why they turn to "alternative" sources. And you can absolutely find MDs who will go along with this grift for money too -- the names of doctors like this are likewise circulated in these same groups.
There's anti-vaxx, and then there's 'I had kids when I was like 19 and didn't get them vaccinated cause all my Trump supporting family told me they're poison' and like, that second one didn't start happening until super recently. The default for a very long time down here was just get them vaccinated cause the hospital did it for you, as part of the process, and hell yea I want my kid to get the best of the best.
This whole like, jo shmo knowing better than the doctors thing, that's pretty recent. It always happened, yeah, but not on the scale that it's happening right now. Either it's the internet spreading disinformation way faster than we ever could before, or somehow everyone caught the same looney bug that old man George who lived in a cabin up the mountain had in the 80s.
The scale has definitely increased and the internet has definitely been a big part in that, but I really do think you're severely overestimating how recent anti-vaxx stuff is. It wasn't the mainstream (which is why most people just got whatever the doctor recommended) but it definitely existed.
What is recent in the US is how tightly it adheres to party politics. Alternative medicine and specifically anti-vaxx is basically a core part of right wing politics in the US now, whereas it used to be something with some bipartisan appeal that happened to be disproportionately popular among right wing women. The Green Party used to include homeopathy and alternative medicine prominently in their platform, even! I think the political polarization when it comes to alternative medicine was already starting when Trump first ran (the Green Party officially dropped it from their platform in 2016) but obviously Covid had a huge impact by making vaccination and "alternatives" like ivermectin such central political issues. It forced the issue into the spotlight much more suddenly, I think, than it otherwise would have, but it had definitely already been growing for a while.
I love it when my smoking family members comes to tell me that the GMO food we eat is harmful.
But… You’re smoking. How do you not see the irony in smoking yet complaining about chemicals in our food?
Thats such a weird idea too cause its like, GMO crops mostly aren’t good, but they’re bad for the environment and for small famers, not bad for our health. They’re all actually really good for our health lol
But like I cant even interact with these people on that level cause they don’t wanna hear it, not from me anyway.
I imagine a lot of those otherwise affected small farmers are motivated to propogate that message for their own self-interest
Yeah thats how I heard about it. Dunno why that message hasn’t reached conservative groups, Monsanto is a monster and by the end we’ll all starve when their monoculture isn’t drought resistant enough.
Somehow random people on youtube who claim to be doctors or whatever are more trustworthy. Oh well.
These are the same fruity weirdos that think vaccines cause autism. I used to think they were harmless, but now I recognize them as actively harmful to society.
It took me half a second to realise you were referring to “fruity weirdos” here as the subject of your sentence, and not “vaccines” 😅
/noise
Thanks, Babypuncher xD
Well I never said I wasn't also actively harmful to society 😉
I feel like this is the basis of many cults: they point to our feeling of something being wrong right now or at least obscured, and appeal to our innate sense that human beings ought to be able to rise above it. The cult introduces some kind of rejected, exclusive knowledge, some system of training and that will enable to us regain that which was our birthright or see through the lies.
Emphasis theirs. As society continues to fragment and lose faith in one another, we're going to see more and more and more extreme cultist ideas emerge, and embraced heartily by people "going their own ways".
To quote Yeat's The Second Coming: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold [...] The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."
I began reading thinking it'll be mostly women who can't afford doctors and midwives. That's one push yes, but so many are rich women choosing to feel powerful and choosing to be Main Character. I understand not wanting unnecessary intervention, but I cannot understand choosing no parental checks and not learning how to do infant resuscitation or how to stop bleeding or .... the horror of choosing to refuse life saving care and watching your baby die.
Midwifery is for uncomplicated births. They are experts at uncomplicated births, which means they are experts at recognizing when something is amiss and is a complication. Having seen so many go right, they will immediately know what isn't, and forward to OBs. I don't know horror stories of how far American midwifery might be from that ideal, but when systems fail, people will lose faith and retreat further into the bushes. But it sounds like many aren't so much fearful of the hospital midwivery, as seduced by the allure of being a Primal Fertility Goddess™ and making this a part of their identity. I'm not criticising mothers of wanting street cred or social media clout, I'm talking about the allure of doing your own research, being self sufficient and being proud of a rare accomplishment and finding a surprising strength within oneself. I know: I chose a midwifery home birth.
The article's ending is haunting. I don't like these scammer women and they have blood on their hands, but it is still sad that another baby has died.
Early internet days, one can inadvertently stumble upon or intentionally watch snuff films where people die on camera. Now we have videos, monetized, where people can watch struggling babies not be helped and die.
That is upsetting. "Wild birth". You know what the offspring of wild animals do a lot? They die.
So they have no idea if they have a complicated pregnancy and if they skip supplements, they're missing out on very important things like folic acid. A friend of mine had a child with spina bifida, while he was growing he had to have surgeries 2 or more times a year to extend the metal rod that allowed him to move on his own.
Quote out of order:
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How on Earth do you make money with that?
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...
Oh.
Yeah, scammers and charlatans who tarnish the reputation of nurse midwives and of patient advocacy in obstetrics.