12/08/2025
This article is intense and devastating and it speaks to something we already know well with data from the Oregon Center for Health Statistics (seen on the second slide).
From the data, we know that homebirth with a trained and licensed midwife– a Certified Professional Midwife, CPM, like ourselves, or a Certified Nurse Midwife, CNM– provides equivocal outcomes to hospitals and freebirths does not.
While the predatory and capitalist nature of the Free Birth Society is its own issue, we can really hold that this movement came out of people not feeling heard and not having options.
Would this be as much of a movement if people could access respectful birth care affordably? Would this movement have grown so much? Probably not…
In the Philly area, we just lost Lifecycle, the oldest birth center in Pennsylvania.
The continual lack of access to affordable care out of the hospital system contributes to people feeling like they don’t have helpful alternatives.
As community midwives, it often feels like we are trying to hold up a crumbling care infrastructure. If you feel like you are being failed by your options, it’s because you are.
[ID: 1: Screenshot of the Guardian article titled “Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births - now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world. 2: Graph with data from Oregon Center for Health Statistics]
