Natural Women

In her debut memoir, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, author and critic at large for The New York Times Amanda Hess explores the convergence of technology and pregnancy. The below excerpt from Second Life, out May 6, examines her fascination with the Free Birth Society and its claims supporting "unassisted birth."

When I first heard about freebirthing, I was sitting on a grassy knoll. This was early in my first pregnancy. I met up with my friend Laura in the park, and she mentioned an article she had read about women who gave birth with no medical assistance. No hospital, no doctor, no midwife. The women birthed the babies and caught them themselves. On purpose. Some of these women refused pregnancy tests, blood draws, and ultrasounds. They called it “freebirth,” and the article had been published after one of their babies died. “Actually,” Laura said, “maybe you don’t want to read that article right now.” I pulled it up as soon as we parted, blades of grass still imprinted on my thighs.

The piece, by NBC News internet culture reporter Brandy Zadrozny, was about a 28-eight-year-old woman named Judith who had also been pregnant for the first time. Judith carried the baby weeks past her due date. She ignored a doctor’s recommendation that she induce labor in a hospital. Instead, she said she consulted strangers who hung out on Facebook groups dedicated to “unassisted birth” and steeled herself by mainlining episodes of a podcast produced by the Free Birth Society. She loved one episode where a woman birthed a baby in a yurt with only her dog acting as what she called a “midwolf.”

“I became obsessed,” Judith told NBC. “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.’” When Judith finally went into labor, her baby’s movements stalled. When her water broke, it was stained brown. By the time she made it to the hospital, her baby was dead. “Your whole responsibility is to protect your child, and I didn’t before he even had a chance to breathe,” Judith said. “I think I brainwashed myself with the internet.”

I promptly bleached Judith and her baby from my memory. My perfectly normal pregnancy had given me enough to worry about; my mind didn’t have any space for her remote and tragic experience. Then, when I was 29 weeks pregnant, a routine ultrasound detected a mysterious fetal abnormality on the screen. Over the next four week, I would be assigned a genetic counselor, a prenatal psychologist, an obstetrician who specialized in high-risk pregnancies. One doctor would extract amniotic fluid from my uterus with a long needle and ship it to a lab for testing. Another would lead me to an MRI machine to map the architecture of my baby’s brain. Reporting to the prenatal imaging center became like a second career. Every day I dragged my body to some new medical scene. Every night my baby tapped and stretched from the inside. I needed to disassociate from my body, my pregnancy, my unknown future that was approaching with terrifying speed. I called up "The Free Birth Society Podcast" on my phone.

Inside the podcast app, I found a thumbnail picture of a white woman sitting cross-legged at the water’s edge, pregnant in a bikini, her arms lifted exultantly above her head. She was the podcast’s host, Emilee Saldaya, a former doula in Los Angeles who had since rejected the “medical model” of birth, founded her society, and built a homestead in North Carolina that became the home base for its work. She launched the show in 2017, in anticipation of her own motherhood journey. “I wanted to absorb as many stories of women birthing in their power that I could as I prepared for my own birth,” she said.

I selected an episode from March and listened at 2x speed. A cabasa rustled. A drum bonged. A woman sang: “Into the wild I go, into the wild I am. It’s been a while, freedom chiiiiiiiiiiild—since I left my roots back home.” The theme was a woo-woo hymnal, but when Saldaya started talking, she had a wry millennial podcast voice, like she was there to dish on the pitfalls of modern dating or recap a sexy true crime. She sounded like a friend, or the kind of internet personality I could pretend was my friend. “Today I have my friend Simone,” Saldaya said. “Simone came to choose freebirth from watching her own cat give birth and tells us how it all began with the thought, If a cat can do it, I can too. And so she did.”

Simone and her housecat were pregnant at the same time, and one day Simone came upon her pet mid-delivery. She said, “The cat had seven kittens by herself. And that totally inspired me.” Simone watched YouTube videos about potential birth complications and decided that they were rare, “unless you’re, you know, completely unhealthy and not in tune with your body.” After all, “we as a society wouldn’t be here without this instinct of birthing.” She added, “I’m a woman, I know that this is what I’m supposed to do.” Her prenatal care consisted of brewing herbal teas, practicing yoga, and sunbathing. When her water broke, she labored under a tree as her partner played the didgeridoo and watched cord-cutting tutorials on YouTube. She called her contractions “waves.” When the baby arrived, “I was completely at bliss. I didn’t know anything else,” Simone said. “We were all bloody and all juicy with womb juice all over us.” And Saldaya said: “It’s just such a beautiful image.”

I debated the freebirthers in my head. A cat is not even a primate, I thought. And, What would a cat midwife even do in an “assisted” cat birth? Claw the baby out? By the way, the mere fact that human life persists on Earth is not helpful in calculating my personal risk in childbirth, because regardless of the persistence of “we as a society,” I, specifically, wish to live. And yet, Simone had just produced a baby with the help of only a video-sharing platform. I could sense my reasoned arguments crumpling beneath the intensity of her physical achievement.

It was Simone’s commentary on birth complications— they do not occur unless you’re, you know, completely unhealthy and not in tune with your body—that really irritated me. The abnormal ultrasound had produced an endless supply of self-blame. I wondered whether I had made some imperceptible mistake during pregnancy that was now manifesting in the body of my child. But when Simone articulated my inner monologue, she cut it loose and handed it to me to inspect more closely. It sounded so mean when she said it out loud.

As I waited for my doctor’s call, I searched the internet for more stories of unassisted births. I knew that the percentage of people who had babies this way was just a sliver in the pie chart of humanity, but inside my phone they grew to populate an entire world. I followed witchy Instagram accounts and requested access to locked Facebook communities. I agreed to their demands: No induction discussion. No assistance talk. Don’t use words like hospital, OB, birth center, midwife, induce etc. Don’t talk about birth related medical professionals or their opinions. The freebirthers spoke of physiological births, ecstatic births, and pain-free supernatural childbirths. They prepared for them with wild pregnancies, deprogramming, plant medicine, and energy work. They gave birth in a cabin, or a teepee, or a stream. They had a name for my pregnancy, too: I was birthing in captivity. Inside my doctor’s office, I stared at my own window to nature: a framed stock image of dewdrops suspended on a leaf.

Saldaya was right about this: the stories of the births on her podcast of steel-willed women birthing in nature were compelling and dramatic. “I love the image of you outside,” Saldaya told Simone, “all bloody on the grass on a blanket with your baby and your man.” Simone’s partner had filmed the whole thing. I knew that this was not for me; I did not want my husband to play a wind instrument like some storybook imp, nor did I want sand anywhere near my dilating cervix. But when I tried to envision my own birth, nothing came up. My future hid behind a hospital curtain.

The medical system had its own obscure birthing vocabulary, too, terms I had to look up: induction, Pitocin, episiotomy, Foley balloon. The freebirth stories smudged out my mental images of hospitals and machines. There were no forceps or scalpels to hasten their childbirth plots. I wanted access to these technologies to get my baby out safely, but clearly, I did not want to have to think about them. I could not even imagine how they might be deployed. These women had crafted their pregnancies into epics and cast themselves as conquering heroes, and I consumed their stories like they were streaming on Bravo.

Judith had come to the Free Birth Society for inspiration as she tried to create her own “badass” unassisted-birth story. And I was there because—why? I wasn’t listening to a podcast about birthing in the hospital, preparing to bring my own child into the world. My pregnancy’s complication remained undiagnosed. I appreciated everything my doctors were doing to treat me and my baby, but the actual experience of becoming a scientific subject consumed me with terror and rage. The freebirthers made me feel more confident in my decision to submit to the medical system’s protocols. Okay — they made feel smug about it. Because I came to them through Judith’s stillbirth, they represented my greatest fear: that a choice I made could bring about my baby’s death. Their strangeness contained this fear, kept it at a comfortable distance. As long as they were whispering in my ears, I could suppress my unease at the medicalization of my own pregnancy. But when an episode ended, my anxiety crept right back in.

By the time I got pregnant, in 2020, the “birth story” had become an inescapable element of human reproduction. Childbirth was not just a natural process, or a medical event, but an experience—a climactic moment in the narrative of the pregnant person’s life. A birth could be choreographed, stage-managed or even filmed in real-time and posted to social media. And if a typical birth represented a good story, a freebirth was positively mythic. It was woman vs. nature, woman vs. society, woman vs. herself. Freebirth aligned with the imperatives of social media platforms to push content to its furthest extremes. It could be styled as a feat of physical and mental but also commercial control. If the birth went viral, it could even launch a personal brand.

The Freebirth Society’s birth stories were just the free tier of a vast digital marketing project. I signed up for the society’s email list and my inbox filled with pitches for its many programs, which it called containers and offerings: in addition to joining a vetted private membership community ($499/year), I was invited to download an online course called the Complete Guide to Freebirth ($399); attend an intensive retreat called the Midwife Within ($3,000); and enroll in the Radical Birth Keeper School, where I could learn to become not a midwife or a doula but a sort of non-medical attendant of other women’s births ($6,000). In 2024, the Radical Birth Keeper School was upgraded to a new offering, called the MatriBirth Midwifery Institute. Think independent midwifery meets leading-edge business school meets life-changing self-mastery tools, but of course, still with no actual midwifery certification (and now $12,000).

I could understand how, as American healthcare became a commodity, some women would find the product so poor that they would eventually refuse to keep buying it. And I was newly aware of how traumatizing the medical system could be. But there was something glib about the conversion of freebirth into a content strategy, in how it styled itself as a premium experience even as it aestheticized risk. In its fully commodified form, freebirth was pitched as the origin story for the ultimate self-made woman, the one who could deliver her own baby and start a business, too, staked on the imagery of her own bonkers birth. In 2022, a German woman went viral after she birthed her fourth baby into the sea like some kind of divine offspring. She posted the video evidence to Instagram, where she documented her Nicaraguan #vanlife under the handle @raggapunzel, earning tabloid recognition and an episode of "The Free Birth Society Podcast." Soon she was offering one-on-one coaching sessions and access to a guided ayahuasca retreat.

One day, I bought the Complete Guide to Freebirth and waded in. There were one hundred lessons. Each featured a video of either Saldaya or her collaborator, fellow birth thought leader Yolande Norris-Clark. They took turns delivering extended scripted monologues on subjects like “industrial obstetrics” and the “scam” of the prenatal ultrasound. My hand drifted to the seventh lesson—“Birth and Death”—and pressed play.

Saldaya appeared in the corner of a blank room, wearing a loose-knit cardigan over a snug tank top that said “FREEBIRTH” in a faux-typewriter script. Her lecture corner seemed hastily appointed with elements of nature: a spiny potted plant was plunked behind her head, and a sheepskin rug lay over the curved lip of a leather couch. “Birth is always a life-or-death situation,” she began. “Life is a life-or-death situation.” Choosing to birth at home without assistance, she said, required her to embrace her own mortality, and that of her baby, too. “Sometimes birth is a meeting with death. This happens during home birth, and it happens in the hospital,” she said. “I came to the conclusion that I would actively choose to be in my own intimate space even if the outcome was death,” she continued. “It is more important to me to receive my baby into my own hands, unmediated by machines and strangers and bright lights.”

Sometimes babies die at home: the ultimate unmediated experience.

When I was 33 weeks pregnant, my obstetrician called with a diagnosis. The fetal cells extracted from my amniotic fluid had tested positive for a rare condition called Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome. I learned that BWS is an overgrowth syndrome that affects one in 10,000 births. Its symptoms can include macrosomia, or excessive growth; omphalocele, an abdominal wall defect where organs develop partly outside the body; and macroglossia, or the enlargement of the tongue. It also increases a child’s risk of certain pediatric cancers, requiring blood and ultrasound screenings from birth.

I was surprised by my relief at the diagnosis. Finally I felt that I could seize authority over my own pregnancy, stop my spiraling brain and prepare for my baby’s arrival. I learned that doctors had developed a specific protocol for treating babies with BWS in the NICU, ensuring their care and safety in the first hours and days of their lives. As I prepared to parent a child with complex medical needs, I realized that the content produced by The Freebirth Society no longer represented an escape from my situation. Now it felt like a warning. Soon the MAHA movement would come to dominate American politics—a movement that champions the “medical freedom” of the individual even as it slashes scientific research, stigmatizes disability, and effectively punishes children with any sign of difference. As I reached the end of the Freebirth Society course, I watched for clues to how this movement would come to view my child.

The 85th chapter of the Complete Guide to Freebirth was dedicated to “developmental differences.” In its instructional video, Yolande Norris-Clark sat in front of a shelf of glazed ceramic vessels and spoke about these differences for seventeen minutes. Having no personal experience with the topic, she told a story about a baby born with gastroschisis, a condition where the baby’s intestines form outside of the body. I had heard about gastroschisis because it was a sister condition to omphalocele; both were abdominal wall defects that required emergency surgery, though babies with omphalocele tended to have more complications and a higher mortality rate.

In her videos, Norris-Clark spoke with breathy assurance, like she was performing a kind of prenatal ASMR. Her voice made extreme choices feel slick and easy. But here she stumbled. “Gastro—gastro-isk-us I think is the right pronunciation,” she said. She plowed into a speech about how babies with gastroschisis die in the hospital too, but she could barely get through the prepared text. “I know of one family whose baby was born at home with . . . gastro . . . skis-skis”—Norris-Clark winced, sucked air between her teeth, and grinned—“and whose birth attendant wrapped their baby’s organs and body in Saran Wrap, and immediately transferred to the hospital, and the baby was saved and survived. Umm, so, we just don’t know!”

I knew. Freebirth was a storytelling project, and pregnancies like mine did not fit into the narrative. How was I supposed to intuit that my baby had a rare genetic condition that required intervention from birth? Was I supposed to diagnose him psychically? Or else embrace his death, comforted that I had selected the lighting scheme for the experience? The lighting in the freebirth course was unflattering, I realized. The plant behind Saldaya’s head was ugly and frail. In her lesson, Norris-Clark said that she wanted to give newborn babies “the most intimate and authentic experience of life,” from the very beginning. But all she had to offer my baby was a laugh and a sheet of plastic. That was the image she thought he deserved: his little body wrapped up like a day-old deli sandwich.

Adapted from SECOND LIFE: Having a Child in the Digital Age by Amanda Hess. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Amanda Hess.