Women are documenting on TikTok what it's like to give birth without any medical assistance. Health experts say the fringe practice is extremely dangerous.
- A small but growing community of TikTokers is glorifying the dangerous practice of "free birth."
- Free birth is giving birth with no medical attendants and sometimes forgoing prenatal care.
Jinti Fell is barefoot on a sandy beach, overlooking a colorful horizon while cradling a baby in her arms.
"I gave birth to her looking out at this view," a caption on the TikTok creator's post from January 29 reads, "so now it feels like our special place to slow down and reconnect."
Most of Fell's TikTok posts are filmed outdoors as she hikes through forests and swims in nearby lakes. A significant amount of her content involves explaining to her 65,000 followers what it was like to "free birth" her two youngest children, including her youngest daughter, Tashi, whom she said was born in a birthing pool looking out at the ocean.
Fell is among a relatively small network of content creators on TikTok who post about "free birthing," or choosing to deliver a baby without any medical assistance. Some free birthers reject professional prenatal care as well, an approach they call "wild pregnancies."
Unlike other forms of "out-of-hospital birth" — which usually means a planned delivery at a birth center staffed by certified nurse midwives or a planned home birth attended by a midwife — free birth is distinct because there's no medical professional present at all. While free birthers may have a partner or even a doula on hand, those people can only provide emotional and informational support — not medical care.
Free birthing is still a fringe phenomenon: According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, only about 1% of births in the US occur at home, and about one-fourth of these are unplanned or unattended.
But there's a growing subculture on social media that glorifies free birth and promotes the dangerous practice to moms-to-be. Emilee Saldaya, the founder of the Free Birth Society — an online, membership-only group where women can pay $499 annually to access monthly workshops and a shared online community centered around the free-birth movement — has over 100,000 followers on Instagram.
Ob-gyns told Insider that while they support women's autonomy and appreciate the flaws of the US maternal-healthcare system, free birth is unnecessarily risky — not a badge of honor to flaunt online.
"I don't believe anybody should be forced to get care if they don't want to," Dr. Danielle Jones, an ob-gyn and online educator, told Insider, "but I have a problem with glorifying that as an achievement."
Free-birthing influencers claim they empower and inform women
The Free Birth Society was founded in 2017, and NBC, The Daily Beast, and others have reported how groups like it are purposefully insular, shunning any commentary about seeing a medical professional or reporting a free-birth-related death.
TikTok may not be that different: It, too, promotes "survivor's bias," only celebrating those pregnancies and births that seemingly turned out fine, according to Jones, who is known across social platforms, including TikTok, as "Mama Doctor Jones."
The free-birth community on TikTok is relatively small compared to other parenting communities on the app. More popular genres, such as gentle parenting, have billions of views on their TikTok hashtags, while the hashtag #freebirth has 259 million views and is mainly dominated by a handful of creators who typically have between 10,000 and 50,000 followers. But their controversial posts often go viral.
The community's most prominent creator, Alice Bender, who did not respond to Insider's request for comment, has 880,000 followers. Much of Bender's content involves answering questions about her experience with free birthing her two children. She has also shared negative experiences she's had with medical professionals while pregnant and described positive experiences she had while free birthing her children. Other smaller creators have taken on a similar content-making format, sharing detailed testimonies about their own free-birth journeys.
When these videos go viral, the creators often receive backlash from TikTokers outside the free-birthing community who say they're making an unsafe choice.
"When your baby is born with severe deformity or medical condition blame yourself," one commenter wrote on creator Kaytlynn Griem's post about using cannabis and forgoing prenatal care and ultrasounds before birthing her children "alone in my kitchen."
Two TikTok free-birth influencers who spoke to Insider said they opted for this less-conventional birthing method because they don't trust traditional healthcare systems and want to give birth in the most "natural" way possible, without the involvement of medical professionals and procedures.
Some free birthers also say the method is cheaper than a hospital birth, which costs nearly $19,000 on average in the US without insurance. An Australian-based creator, Tiana-Rose Pritchard, who's planning her second free birth, posted a video in March explaining that she would be spending around 4,000 Australian dollars, or about $2,704, on the entire process, while the average Australian childbirth costs about $5,000.
Some influencers say more costs can be cut if mothers choose to eliminate prenatal care costs like vitamins, ultrasounds, and genetic testing — though some of this is also covered under most US insurance plans.
But for the women Insider spoke to, money isn't the main reason they chose to free birth.
"Many women choose to free birth to avoid the traumas that can occur in the hospital system. To me, you can't put a price tag on that," Pritchard said.
Griem, 24, opted for a free birth with her second child for similar reasons, telling Insider, "I can't imagine giving birth in a random room with dozens of people around me that I don't even know, and it was just nice being in the comfort and safety of my home."
Many free-birth TikTokers tell their followers they believe that free birthing allowed them to have a calmer and more relaxed experience than they would have had in a hospital.
Pritchard told Insider that she doesn't post about free birthing to convince other women to do the same, but simply to share her own journey and thoughts so viewers can decide how they feel about the practice for themselves.
"It's important for me to share this because women should be able to make informed choices with all the information, not just mainstream procedures," she said.
The US maternal healthcare system is flawed – but experts say free birth is not the answer
The women's-health experts who spoke to Insider understood the appeal of free birth. After all, maternal death rates in the US are the highest in the developed world — reaching an all-time high in 2021.
The numbers are particularly dire for women of color in America, who are nearly three times more likely to die during childbirth as white women, no matter their level of education or access to healthcare.
But rather than truly supporting the people most marginalized or traumatized by the maternal-healthcare system, namely Black women, free-birth communities seem to almost entirely attract privileged white women. The top free-birth content creators on TikTok are predominantly white, while most of the women of color who promote free birth have fewer than 1,000 followers.
The argument that free-birth advocates make that the method is something women have done for millennia is also misguided, doctors told Insider. Be it a midwife or community member, pregnant and birthing women have been cared for since ancient times, Jones said.
Even then, "when people didn't have midwives or doctors, the women in the community still monitored their pregnancy, they did abdominal palpations, they gave them whatever at the time was normal for them to drink to help with labor," she said. "It has never been that people had nothing during their pregnancy."
Jones said even the notion that laboring sans medical support is free is "inherently privileged."
"You have people who free birth because that's their only option: They don't have a midwife, they don't have a doctor, they don't have money," she said.
Giving birth alone can have deadly consequences for mother and baby
Free birth is, in Rankins' view, rebellious without a cause.
"I support out-of-hospital birth, in-hospital birth, and making choices for yourself," Rankins told Insider. "But this is the one line where I clearly say, 'This is not something you should do. This is not based on science or evidence. The risk is too high for something like this.' It's just not something that I could ever support."
Birth-center births and planned home births are safer options for people who want to avoid hospitals, she and medical organizations say. For low-risk women with healthy, normal pregnancies, fewer medical interventions during childbirth can also be beneficial in a hospital setting.
But one of the most pronounced risks of free birth is that if something does go wrong, there's no guarantee a birthing person can get to a hospital — if they notice something is wrong at all. Up to 37% of first-time moms need to transfer to a hospital during a home birth— but in those cases, that possibility can be planned for if the midwife has admitting privileges to a nearby hospital.
"Birth is unpredictable," Rankins said, and a trained medical professional is needed to watch for issues like a drop in the baby's heartbeat or postpartum hemorrhage, one of the leading causes of maternal death, even if a hospital transfer isn't necessary.
There are "many, many, conditions" that if taken care of right away, the baby will be fine, Jones said. "But if ignored for hours or sometimes even minutes, it changes the outcome."
And while many free-birth babies and moms will be OK, there have been multiple reports of babies dying during free birth from conditions as simple and preventable as a mother's untreated urinary-tract infection.
For some providers, though, preaching the risks of free birth can backfire. Jones said that when doctors regard a baby's safety above and beyond a mom's bodily autonomy, they push potential patients away from standard medical care and toward fringe practices like free birth.
"I think medicine has to get back to a place where we give people the information they need and we tell them why it's recommended, but we don't make people feel like we're going to abandon them if they decide not to do something — even if we disagree," she said.