Into the wild I am, it's been in the wild I am. It's been a while,

I am. It's been a while freedom child since I left my roots back home. Into a wild I'm going into the wild I head. It's been a while freedom child since I let my roots

back home. Welcome to the Free Birth Society podcast. This is a radical space for women who are ready to celebrate their autonomous choices in birth, motherhood, and beyond.

Together, we'll learn about wild birth through personal narrative,

we'll explore the politics of birth and we'll analyze everything that relates to

our lives as women from a feminist perspective. Here's your host, Emily Saldera.

It's been a wild feeding child.

Since I've left my rules back home. I am grateful to be bringing you this story of a wise woman with quite the story to tell.

Shanika is from Jamaica, currently living in Atlanta, Georgia,

and both a free-birther and a radical birthkeeper.

She tells us of her first birth at 17 in the hospital and then the tragic tale of her daughter's death three years later.

And yet in the loss of her daughter, Shanika had a true spiritual awakening

and became the incredible woman that she is today.

Shanika is a deep well of wisdom,

and her story will surely inspire you to be your authentic self. I was born in Jamaica and then I came to America when I was about six years old.

So my parents you know had to make a decision and a journey to come to somewhere totally new and trying to make life.

So not a lot of people know this about me if they don't really know me, but my father was like

a drug dealer, like his whole side of my father's family like aunts and he

had about 12 brothers and sisters and maybe about two or three of them wasn't into that life but the rest of them that's what they did to survive

and growing up in Philly like that was that was the culture of like being Jamaican and you know trying to find some autonomy and

success monetarily so that's what I grew up with but then when I was about 10 years

old my father built a house in Jamaica. We went back for two years and I attended school there and then my mom made the decision to come back to Philadelphia with my sister and then my father and went to England, you know, to live.

...