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, Shirin Calais.

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 Shirin first came across this story.

So Shirin Kala, 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.

So we started by monitoring the Free Birth Society more closely and listening

to more of their content and discovered that so much of this, a lot of the information that we

were finding was that they were putting out misleading, false and sometimes quite dangerous

information around pregnancy and birth. And so we started to suspect that there may be cases of real world harm

connected to this. This is an organisation with a huge international following. And so we set out

to try and find out how many, if there, how many women were impacted by this information.

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