My thoughts on the Free Birth Society expose piece in the press, as someone who chose ‘freebirth’ for themselves and who supports other women navigating it…

Firstly, freebirth and the FBS are not the same thing and it’s important to keep differentiating between the two. Birth without a medical professional in attendance is not an ideology, it is just is a way of birthing life that has belonged to women since the beginning of time, and will do long into the future. Women will always be doing it and finding ways to support it.

Not because it’s trendy or because we’ve been influenced but because it’s ours, birth on our own terms is woven into the very fabric of our being, it’s the embodiment of our cyclic and life giving natures and we’ll always be drawn to birth in a way that feels private, family and mother-led, self-directed, physiological, protected, unassisted and sacred.

Birth has always been a part of life, a part of the family and community. Yes, there’s also traditionally been continuity of care from a known, skilled wise woman (though there is evidence from many indigenous cultures of women going off totally alone, to specific sacred sites in nature to give birth) and yet today that kind of care and that kind of wise woman who is truly ‘with us’, that most of us desire, has been systematically taken from us and replaced - from the messiness of the individual to the shiny efficiency of the system.

The deaths and tragedies seen in freebirth are beyond heartbreaking and yet we can’t also forget the deaths, obstetric violence, life long injuries, postpartum depression, lack of breastfeeding, trauma, iatrogenic harm and the harms of systemic racism of assisted and managed birth too. Birthing outside the system is not inherently safe, there’s always risks as there are to everything in life and birthing inside the system is also not inherently safe, there’s risks there too.

Women must make the choices that feel right to them and them alone and they must live with those choices. Freebirth is a valid choice for many women and families today, sometimes made through previous trauma or lack of other options that feel safe and right, but also sometimes made because they just don’t want the type of care they are being offered today, the co-opted midwifery of medical management, guidelines, pressure, verbal, emotional and physical abuse, conveyor belt and non-individualised care, and of their choices being taken away. 

Birth is sacred and yet it’s also wild and unpredictable, just as nature is wild and unpredictable. It can grab you by the horns and take you somewhere completely unexpected and present you with choices you weren’t planning to have to make. The women that come to me wanting to make the choice to freebirth are often the most educated about this, know what to look out for, have discussed with their partner what choices they would make if things did veer off and are willing to take responsibility for it all. They are not ever ‘freebirth at all costs.’ Most of the time undisturbed birth does work very well and yet I’ve also supported many transfers and decisions to accept medical care as soon as the woman felt it was needed.

However, what happens when that desire for autonomy leads us to an unregulated online space where the promise of those making similar birth choices and ‘sisterhood’ is put behind a price wall? Where notions of ideology are perpetuated and have ultimately led to outcomes that potentially could have been prevented,?. Can we assume that these women felt some pressure to ‘perform’ birth in a certain way? I think so. A while back, I wrote a post on my Instagram about the red flags in obstetrics that are common in cults and I was working on one about how the same is true of the other end of the ‘birth choice spectrum too’ (I’m just terrible at social media these days but we’ve been discussing it in our community and with my birth clients a lot!) 

Tactics of shaming different choices, lack of nuance, only allowing one narrative, removing and shaming those who question anything that goes against what you’re trying to sell, up-selling to vulnerable women and dogma are not ok. 

The notion perpetuated that transfers never happen or when they do it’s because the woman didn’t do enough of the inner work seemed ridiculous to me, I’d only attended a dozen or so births at the time but had already seen that medical care was occasionally needed, even when the women had done everything ‘right.’ They also once put a post out claiming that ‘there’s no such thing as retained placenta only the impatience of attendants’ which seemed particularly problematic to me, I’d seen a true retained placenta already, even in a completely undisturbed birth and medical intervention was needed in that instance. 

When preparing for my own freebirth, I found FBS and I devoured the podcast of women’s stories, they did feel like a lighthouse when so much in the birth world was dark, especially in the post-Covid context. I took their complete guide to birth course also and found it really informative. 

However, I’m glad I still made choices that felt right to me and me alone at the time. Although we decided to birth by ourselves I did interview independent midwives, decide to have antenatal care, a blood test and I had an nhs midwife attend us once the placenta was out. Even if I may not make the same choices again today for myself, I’m glad I did what was right for me at the time and not just trying to follow some online ideal. In my experience, most of the women I support follow similar paths of picking and choosing what works best for them, as is their legal right to do so.

I am also very glad that I didn’t spend thousands of pounds on their birthkeeper trainings, (no shade to those that did!) even though the marketing was very tempting at one point. Something about the cost in itself just felt unethical to me. I also had started to have a feeling, through the information and attitude they were sharing, that they were actively harmful to some groups and that I wouldn’t find the answers I was looking for and the support I needed as a new birthkeeper, and that questions about when medical care was truly needed in birth would likely be shut down, which now lots of whistleblowers from inside of their trainings have actually confirmed. 

There’s no denying that to freebirth is to take radical responsibility for all outcomes, and that no outcome is ever guaranteed, but it’s clear from the article that when things were veering from ‘normal’ those women were turning to online help rather than getting the actual medical help they needed. 

This is where we need to be careful, in this age of information and social media it’s so easy to fall down an alluring rabbit hole or into a cult-like group, it’s so hard to shut out all the noise and make informed decisions that are truly right for you and your family, especially when its packaged up for us.

It’s important that this was called out and yet it’s also important that we don’t let the impact of freebirth being in the media again take away our choices and our rights. That we remember that the harms caused by the over-medicalisation of birth and the overuse of unnecessary interventions today must be called out just as much. We’re not free until all women are free.