The Birth Keepers: When Emilee met Yolande – episode two

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:29two.

0:33Hi, I'm Shirin Kale and I'm Lucy Osborne. You're listening to The Birth Keepers, a new six-part series from The Guardian Investigates. Just before we start, this series contains references to baby loss and maternal harm.

0:55Before Emily Saldea was the leader of a self-proclaimed movement. She was Emily Benner, aka Hoop Nasty. There's a video on an old YouTube account posted by Emily in 2010. It's got 500 views, a showreel from her time as a hula hooper. Emily is dancing on stage in an LA nightclub, gyrating in a hoop under red and blue strobe lights. It feels very noughties. She's wearing a trilby. She's got the fingerless gloves. She's actually pretty good. It's hard to imagine this is the same woman who 15 years later would be hosting this festival on her land in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

1:50June 2025. Emily is sitting in a sage-cleansed yurt, her pregnant belly exposed in a flowing green crop top. Her hair in braids, adorned with gold beads. No crown, this time. She's surrounded by women in linens and flower crowns, singing and discussing their upcoming free births, their words infused with her teachings.

2:19But then again, on reflection, maybe it's not that surprising. In both of these eras, Emily is in the spotlight. She's confident and aware of what makes a striking image. To understand the pull of the free birth society, you need to understand who Emily Saldea is and how Emily and her business partner, Yolanda Norris-Clark, became the women they are today. Emily and Yolanda love to remind their listeners of their extensive birth experience. Having attended hundreds of births in every environment imaginable, really. I actually have spent over 20 years working in the birth field, supporting other women witnessing births.

3:07They consistently claim to have 40-plus years of experience between them. And FBS has made millions of dollars in revenue from women who trusted them, paid them for their expertise. But are they who they say they are?

3:25From The Guardian Investigates, I'm Lucy Osborne. And I'm Shirin Kale. This is The Birth Keepers. Episode 2, When Emily Met Yolanda

3:45Looking at Emily and Yolanda's childhoods, you wouldn't put either of them on the path to renounce mainstream medicine. In fact, both of them came from medical families. Emily's mum is an obstetric nurse and her dad sold medical equipment to neonatal units. And Yolanda's grandfather was kind of a big deal, in academic circles. He was a medical historian who specialised in the history of infectious diseases like cholera. Which is striking, because Yolanda doesn't actually believe that germs cause disease. So, why did they devote their lives to condemning the medical system? And how did they become the world's leading free-birth influencers?

4:29Emily was born in Florida in 1985. Her parents divorced when she was around nine, which she found difficult. I felt very uncared for, like very not looked after. I was being bullied at school. Emily has spoken to her followers about her childhood and teenage years, how her parents' divorce left her lonely and angry. It's like my mean girl came out of that persona. I was bullied and then I went to a new school and so I showed up to that school as a bully. So cringe. When she was 16 she dropped out of high school and moved to LA. Emily fell in with an older crowd. They went to Burning Man back when Burning Man was pretty wild.

5:17They did warehouse parties and Kundalini yoga, which is famously very intense. Emily and Extra Cash by Trimming Weed. I've spoken to multiple people who were close to Emily during those years in LA, the hoop nasty years, and they told me that she was playful, ambitious and adventurous. One phrase kept coming up. Emily was a force. She went with a hippie lefty crowd, but Emily was always a bit different. She had a capitalist streak and she didn't see those things as incompatible. Why not be spiritual and rich? One former friend told me that Emily wanted to, have a big voice and be an activist, but she was also oriented towards making money.

6:08after also working as a waitress infant masseuse nanny and yoga instructor emily found what seemed to be her calling she trained as a doula doulas aren't midwives it's a non-medical job they support women emotionally and practically during pregnancy birth and afterwards there's actually footage of Emily working as a doula from a documentary in 2015. She's smiling and encouraging a woman as she gives birth. Back then, Emily seemed really open-minded about how women should give birth. Her website at the time said, quote, I am experienced, comfortable and confident in both hospital and home birth settings.

6:53I support all methods of birthing and look forward to helping you explore what feels right for your family. She was great. She was really like passionate and fiery. Laura Garland met Emily around 2013. She was somebody that would get things done. She had a lot of ideas and a lot of confidence and she was fun and funny. Together they worked on the LA Doula Project, a non-profit that provided free doulas to low-income women. The LA Doula Project provides non-judgmental doula support to people across the spectrum of reproductive experiences. I was really young when I had an abortion. Emily's also spoken many times about working as a midwife's assistant.

7:40But that midwife told me that although Emily went to some of her training sessions for assistance, she only ever remembers her assisting at one or two births and she mostly worked on the front desk. She told me that, quote,

8:01Emily's work as a doula took her into hospitals around LA. And as time went by, what she saw in those rooms, it horrified her. I mean, really sincerely haunted. It took me years to get some of those images out of my head on the daily. Laura dug out an old email Emily sent her and a group of local doulas. And she said, hi, ladies. My last five births have been incredibly hard on me. Hard to witness, hard to process, hard on my body, mind, spirit, everything. I have seen so much trauma and abuse these past few births, and I feel like I'm unraveling with nowhere to go to wrap my heart around it all.

8:42How do you feel reading that back? Oh, I really, my heart hurts for her. My heart hurts for her because she really cared so deeply about her clients.

9:00The trauma and abuse Emily saw, it's the result of a system that many people see as fundamentally broken. I reported on maternal health care in the UK, and I also gave birth in a hospital in London, and the experience was not great. In the US, for a multitude of reasons, things are even worse. The United States has some of the worst maternal and neonatal death rates in the developed world. For women giving birth in many countries, it's a roll of the dice. Do you get medics who are going to listen to you, treat you kindly and ask for consent before they do things? Or not? Very frequently women are touched without consent.

9:44Ivy Dweva is a doula who also works on the LA Doula Project. which wouldn't necessarily be construed as violence but when you're looking at actually having hands go into your vagina without being checked in with without having any communication without being listened to it would already be painful if you're not prepared for that if you're not relaxed if you've never met this person before which is often the case when a nurse is walking in in a hospital. I have also seen episiotomies done without consent, where the doctor just takes out the scissors and cuts. An episiotomy is when a doctor cuts the vaginal opening to make it bigger for the baby to come out.

10:30So when this is done without consent, understandably, women can experience this as an assault. Emily saw this. Women she felt were being assaulted, and she also saw something else. that concerned her. How many women she felt were being pushed into C-sections. It's something Ivy has seen too. There's a doctor in Los Angeles who I won't mention by name because she could probably sue me, but she's referred to as the butcher because she just sections people. Like, needed or not needed, that's just what she does.

11:08To be clear, there's nothing wrong with getting a C-section if you need one or if you want one. But there's also good reasons why women don't want to have C-sections unless absolutely necessary. It's major surgery. Also, in the US, where healthcare is privatised and there's a fear of litigation if things go wrong, experts say that hospitals are financially incentivised to push C-sections. Which means women can feel pressured to have surgery that they may not have needed. and they can emerge from their births feeling brutalised.

11:57This is the system Emily was seeing play out. Laura remembers Emily's discomfort. I don't think she was ever happy to be within the system. You know, I think, like many of us, she really wanted to change the system from within. And I think that she just was less and less able to tolerate the system. And how did Emily feel when one of her clients transferred to the hospital? She would be really frustrated. Frustrated and disappointed. When Laurie gave birth herself, she chose to transfer to hospital and she felt like it affected her friendship with Emily. I did feel like Emily was disappointed or a little bit judging me because of my transfer.

12:47I felt like our relationship shifted a little bit after that. Emily was clear. The hospital is a place you don't want to give birth in unless you absolutely have to. Home's the best place to give birth. And many women agree, it makes sense, because women can feel more relaxed at home. This helps oxytocin, the hormone of birth, get flowing, encouraging their labours to unfold naturally. Emily had initially planned to train as a home birth midwife. She'd help her clients stay away from the fluorescent strip lights of the hospital and have a beautiful and empowered birth at home. But then Emily started to see these midwives, even home birth midwives, as part of the problem.

13:33Maybe even worse, because they pretended to be on the women's side and then Emily felt betrayed them. It's just more the same. And in some ways, it's even worse because the abuse and the sabotage is happening in her home, you know, on her bed.

13:55Emily at this point in 2016, she's a doula. She's not meant to give medical advice. But I spoke to a midwife who attended a home birth with Emily around this time. A couple of days after the mother's waters broke, the midwife advised that they should transfer to hospital. Her labour wasn't progressing and there was an infection risk. According to the midwife, Emily suggested to the mother that she should not tell the doctor how long her waters had been open. in the hope she might avoid a C-section. The midwife says she was furious. She'd never worked with a doula who had recommended lying before.

14:34This is the start of a pattern that Lucy and I saw again and again with Emily, which is that she advises women in labour to lie to doctors, and sometimes she even gives them a script of what to say. Emily says she began attending births underground, as the sole attendant with no midwife with her, although Lucy and I haven't been able to verify this. I kept it quite quiet. It was very underground. You know, I wasn't public about it, but the women kept coming. And I decided, you know, I realised this is it. This is everything. This is the truth about birth. And this is what I've been trying to figure out.

15:21One day in 2016, Emily was listening to a podcast in her kitchen. And she heard a guest describe themselves as a birth keeper. With this sweet, gentle voice of Yolanda Clark, Yolanda Norris Clark. The woman who was about to change the course of Emily's life. Good morning. Hi. Yeah, my name is Yolanda Clark. from barhousewife.com.

16:01Yolanda Norris-Clark already had an online following. She had a blog, a podcast, and had been posting about her life online for years. My journey as a homeschooling mother and a busy ceramic artist and a free birth doula. And I'm also a Pilates instructor and an entrepreneur and a piano teacher, among other things. Yolanda's path into birth work was unusual. She got pregnant at 19 with her first husband, and she hired as her midwife a woman called Gloria LeMay, who's kind of famous in Vancouver, where Yolanda's from. Gloria's an unlicensed midwife. She's sort of a folk hero to some, to others a dangerous, unqualified charlatan.

16:49She's repeatedly been in trouble with the law. Gloria attended Yolanda's first two births, but she did more than that. She inspired Yolanda's lifelong passion for birth. When Yolanda was 24, she separated from her husband, leaving her two young sons with him. She then married Lee Clark, a ceramic artist, and they settled down on half an acre of land near the hamlet of Queenstown, New Brunswick. She is quite the individual, quite a character. I don't think she'd mind me saying she's a bit of a character. This is Lily Smallwood. She met Yolanda around 2013. So confident, beautiful, radiant, so sure of herself.

17:29She draws you in 100%. I became a health coach because I too have struggled with and triumphed over issues around food, health and healing. My mission is to inspire other mothers to recognise their own... hard not to be drawn in to her as soon as she starts to talk, as soon as she starts to engage with you. When Lily met Yolanda, Yolanda was living this lifestyle that looked so idyllic. She was blogging about it. Pictures of her walking in the woods, baking, making art, kids everywhere running free. And of course, she's free birthing.

18:10in 2012 she shared a video of one of her free births online it brought her to the attention of the online birth world she started to become a bit of a celebrity yolanda's always been very firm about her views on birth but as the years passed she got more entrenched for her first few pregnancies, she received prenatal care, but soon became an advocate for what she called wild pregnancy, a term she claims she invented. No appointments, no blood tests, no ultrasounds. Yolanda became increasingly convinced that what she termed the medical industrial complex was best avoided at all costs. She set up meetings and cafes for local birth workers and pregnant women.

18:54Lily went along. She had also free birthed her children.

19:01It was very nice to be welcomed into her community, her sphere, and to be treated as a friend. And I won't say equal, I won't say equal, but she's always been, you know, the top dog. And she has such confidence and belief in herself and in birth and it inspires you. It inspires you to get involved, you know, and to believe in her.

19:35Yolanda is not a midwife. She actually trained as a doula. But when she starts attending births in New Brunswick, she doesn't call herself a doula. She calls herself a traditional birth attendant. What you're paying for is, you know, the ongoing support and her being available on call for them. And and people did find value in that. And so they paid for it. How is she advertising herself? Was she saying that she was a midwife? Never. She would always say, I'm not a midwife. Like we it was she was very much not going to use that term. That was a term that because because it's a regulated profession and Yolanda is a very intelligent woman.

20:16And she was very mindful of how to phrase it and how to say it so that it would never be a legal concern. And that was a concern I had, you know, when I said, OK, I'll attend a birth with you. It was very much a conversation we had about what we can say, what you should say. And she always knew where the line was, like you don't cross this line. You know, if you say that we're here to support people to be completely autonomous and to take control over their own life and outcome, well, then that's freeing yourself of that responsibility. And that was like a conscious thing that she would do is that no matter what she said, if it's prefaced with the idea, I'm not a medical professional, I have no medical training.

21:00That way, you know, then there's no responsibility. There's no accountability on our part. For this, in a country with free health care, Yolanda would charge up to$3 ,000 a birth. A lot more than a local doula would charge, which is what Lily considered herself to be. Yolanda continued attending births in New Brunswick. That's what she was doing when she popped up on the podcast Emily was listening to in LA.

21:32when Emily heard Yolanda it was like listening to somebody with the answers somebody who embodied everything Emily had been reaching for and had built an online following Emily had been interested in starting a business for a while she had trained with the conscious Leadership Group, a consultancy geared towards CEOs and business leaders. In conscious organizations, people step forward and they take or claim or own responsibility. What this means in its most radical sense is that whatever is occurring in my life, I am responsible for it. In the most powerful way, I'm actually creating it. Emily learned about something called the drama triangle.

22:19In this framework, you can either be a victim, a villain, or a hero. Or step out of the drama triangle and take total responsibility for your life. Emily's big breakthrough was applying this philosophy to birth. And it was like, you know, the sky opened up and angels sang for me. Instead of trying to save her clients by playing the hero, they needed to save themselves by taking radical responsibility for their births. By free birthing. Laura, Emily's former doula colleague from L.A., remembers the moment. She had been getting into these ayahuasca ceremonies where she had this vision and this understanding, this kind of epiphany, that it was not possible to have true mother-led births in the system with any assistance.

23:17And I remember talking to her. She had the idea for the Free Birth Society and I remember she sent me the logo. And Emily knew who she needed to help her. I think she might have said that there's this woman up in Canada who is just amazing and I'm obsessed with her and I'm going to make her be my best friend. Something along those lines. She said that she was going to make her be her best friend. And once she found out about her, I think she was very impressed. Emily, you know, Emily didn't finish high school. And so she sometimes admires people who have a more kind of educated manner of speaking.

23:57And I think that she was really enamored of, you know, just Yolanda's voice and her cadence and the way she sounds so smart. And so I was all lit up and I find you on Facebook and I send you a message and I'm so excited. Emily and Yolanda discussed this moment on the FBS podcast. I said, like, I just found you on the podcast. I love everything you're saying. I'm doing a lot of the same work and we're going to become best friends. Do you remember what you said back to me? It seems Yolanda was less sure on Emily. I think I responded to him in a very sort of like polite Canadian sort of like, it's really nice to thank you for reaching out, you know.

24:41Oh yeah. But I was really like, no. And, you know, I'm kind of hard to... Tough nut to crack. A little bit of a tough nut to crack. Yeah.