2025-12-13
11 分钟This is The Guardian.
They were putting out misleading,
false and sometimes quite dangerous information around pregnancy and birth.
It's not true what the medical system, what your medical midwives are all saying,
that this amount of leaders of blood loss is hemorrhage.
Really nothing could prepare us for the amount of harm that we would discover that was linked to the organisation.
We speak to one of the reporters behind the Guardian's investigation into the Free Birth Society and how it radicalised pregnant women around the world.
From the Guardians Today in Focus, this is the latest with me, Lucy Hoff.
With me is Lucy Osborne, Guardian Special Correspondent,
one of the two investigative reporters who's been looking into the Free Birth Society for more than a year now with your colleague,
Sharon Carlo.
So Lucy, thanks so much for being with us and thank you for your reporting,
the print piece of which came out last month,
but we've also got a six-part podcast series called The Birth Keepers,
which was also landed this week too.
Talk me through how you and Sharon first came across this story.
So, Shirin Kale, who's my reporting partner,
we were both pregnant around the same time in 2022 and we were just really concerned about the amount of misinformation that we were finding on social media around pregnancy and birth.
And so,
we thought it was really important to look into it and sort of find out which of these accounts we should be looking at and the extent to which this information was having an impact on women.