Influencers made millions pushing 'wild' births - now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world [View all]

A year-long investigation reveals how mothers lost children after being radicalised by uplifting podcast tales of births without midwives or doctors

Investigation by Sirin Kale and Lucy Osborne
Sat 22 Nov 2025 02.00 EST

As Esau Lopez was asphyxiated for the first 17 minutes of his life on Earth, the atmosphere in the room remained serene, even ecstatic. Acoustic music crooned from a speaker in a modest two-bedroom apartment in a suburb of Pennsylvania. “You are a queen,” murmured one of three friends in the room.

Only Esau’s mother, Gabrielle Lopez, felt something was wrong. She was pushing hard, but her son would not be born. “Can you help [him] out?” she asked, as Esau crowned. “Baby is coming,” the friend replied. Four minutes later, Lopez asked again, “Can you grab [him]?” Another friend murmured, “Baby is safe.” Six minutes passed. Again, Lopez asked, “Can you grab [him]?”

Lopez could not see the cord wrapped around her son’s neck, nor the bubbles blowing from his mouth. She did not know that his shoulder was grinding against her pubic bone, like a tire spinning on gravel. But “deep down”, she says, “I knew he was stuck.”

Esau was experiencing shoulder dystocia, meaning his head was born, but his body did not follow. Midwives and obstetricians are trained in how to resolve this complication, which occurs in up to 1% of births, but as Lopez was freebirthing, meaning giving birth without any medical providers present, no one in the room understood that, with every minute that passed, Esau was sustaining an irreversible brain injury. In a birth attended by a trained professional, a five-minute delay between a baby’s head and body emerging would be an emergency. Seventeen minutes is unthinkable.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/nov/22/free-birth-society-linked-to-babies-deaths-investigation?CMP=bsky_gu