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While baby Esau was struggling to breathe for the opening quarter-hour of his life on this world, the atmosphere in the room remained calm, even joyful. Soft music crooned from a audio device in a modest home in a community of the state. “You are a goddess,” murmured one of three friends in the room.

Just Esau’s parent, Gabrielle Lopez, felt something was wrong. She was laboring intensely, but her baby would not be born. “Can you assist him?” she inquired, as Esau appeared. “Baby is on the way,” the companion answered. Four minutes later, Lopez repeated her question, “Can you take him?” A different companion said, “Baby is secure.” A short time passed. Once more, Lopez inquired, “Can you grab [him]?”

Lopez could not see the umbilical cord entangled around her son’s nape, nor the foam blowing from his oral cavity. She did not know that his shoulder was pressing against her pubic bone, comparable to a tire rotating on stones. But “deep down”, she says, “I sensed he was trapped.”

Esau was experiencing difficult delivery, indicating his head was delivered, but his torso did not proceed. Childbirth specialists and obstetricians are educated in how to manage this issue, which arises in as many as 1% of births, but as Lopez was delivering without medical help, meaning delivering without any medical providers present, no one in the area realized that, with each moment, Esau was suffering an permanent neurological damage. In a delivery managed by a qualified expert, a short gap between a newborn's head and torso appearing would be an crisis. Such a lengthy delay is unimaginable.

Nobody enters a cult by choice. You believe you’re joining a wonderful community

With a extraordinary exertion, Lopez bore down, and Esau was delivered at night on that autumn day. He was limp and unresponsive and lifeless. His body was pale and his limbs were purple, both signs of acute oxygen deprivation. The only noise he produced was a weak sound. His dad Rolando handed Esau to his mom. “Do you believe he should breathe?” she inquired. “He’s good,” her friend responded. Lopez cradled her unmoving son, her gaze huge.

All present in the room was frightened at that moment, but concealing it. To articulate what they were all sensing seemed huge, as a disloyalty of Lopez and her ability to bring Esau into the earth, but also of something more significant: of delivery itself. As the moments dragged on, and Esau remained still, Lopez and her acquaintances repeated of what their teacher, the originator of the Free Birth Society, the leader, had told them: birth is safe. Trust the process.

So they suppressed their rising panic and stayed. “It appeared,” recalls Lopez’s companion, “that we found ourselves in some form of alternate reality.”

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Lopez had become acquainted with her companions through the Free Birth Society (FBS), a enterprise that promotes freebirth. Different from domestic delivery – childbirth at residence with a birth attendant in supervision – natural delivery means delivering without any medical support. The organization promotes a method widely seen as extreme, even among natural delivery enthusiasts: it is against sonography, which it falsely claims injures babies, minimizes major complications and encourages untracked gestation, signifying pregnancy without any prenatal care.

FBS was created by ex-doula the founder, and the majority of females encounter it through its audio program, which has been streamed five million times, its social media profile, which has 132,000 followers, its online channel, with approximately 25m views, or its popular The Complete Guide to Freebirth, a video course jointly produced by the founder with fellow ex-doula Yolande Norris-Clark, offered digitally from FBS’s slick website. Review of FBS’s financial records by Stacey Ferris, a financial investigator and academic at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, estimates it has made money exceeding $13m since that year.

After Lopez discovered the audio program she was hooked, hearing an episode almost every day. For the fee, she joined the organization's premium, members-only forum, the community name, where she met the companions in the area when Esau was arrived. To get ready for her freebirth, she bought the comprehensive manual in that spring for $399 – a considerable expense to the previously young nanny.

After consuming hundreds of hours of organization resources, Lopez became certain freebirthing was the most secure way to bring her unborn child, away from excessive procedures. Previously in her extended delivery, Lopez had attended her local hospital for an sonogram as the infant had decreased activity as much as usual. Staff encouraged her to stay, alerting she was at increased probability of the birth issue, as the child was “huge”. But Lopez didn't worry. Vividly remembered was a newsletter she’d gotten from the co-founder, stating concerns of the birth issue were “overstated”. From the resource, Lopez had learned that maternal “systems do not grow babies that we can't give birth to”.

Shortly thereafter, with Esau still not breathing, the spell in Lopez’s space ended. Lopez took charge, naturally performing CPR on her child as her {friend|companion|acquaint