The Free Birth Society is a wake-up call

Mainstream medicine, birth, and who gets to define "misinformation"

Dec 08, 2025

This past weekend, the Guardian published a damning, longform piece of investigative journalism about the Free Birth Society.

The Free Birth Society is an organization dedicated to the practice of free birth, or birth without any medical assistance.

It’s crucial to distinguish free birth from home birth; the latter is attended by medical professionals, usually Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs) or Certified Nurse-Midwives (CNMs), whereas in the former, a woman is either alone, with her partner and/or family, or with other women.

Free Birth Society was founded in 2017 by Emilee Saldaya, a high school dropout, former doula, and, as it turns out, extremely savvy entrepreneur. It began as a podcast, on which women told their stories of free birth, and then evolved into a series of guides, courses, and eventually a “midwifery school,” which was entirely online, involved no medical training whatsoever, and cost $12,000.

I discovered Free Birth Society in 2021. At the time, Jorge, Elena and I were down in Oaxaca for a month, taking advantage of virtual “school.” Covid fears and restrictions were omnipresent. One had to wipe one’s feet on a “sanitary mat” – a square of rubber smothered in about an inch of hospital-grade disinfectant – before entering any building. The Mexican authorities had decided that Covid traveled mostly on the soles of shoes, and mandated every business place one of these virus-busting mats in the doorway.

Travel to villages was forbidden. Everyone masked, even people walking alone on the mountainside. In Mexico, many children spent years attending “tele-escuela”: virtual school.

A friend told me a story of another friend of hers who’d had a free birth in a remote part of Mexico. The story hit extra hard at a time of such intense fear, when a person’s risk tolerance was so visible and palpable. We were extremely cautious: we’d spent the vast majority of our trip at the beach, outside without a soul in sight. Back in the city, I refused to go to restaurants or cafes, until finally Jorge convinced me on our last night to have dinner at our favorite restaurant.

This is stupid, I argued, this is NOT worth it, and then we had our first real meal outside of our increasingly suffocating home in a year and a half. Oaxacan mole, grilled watermelon salad, caldo tlalpeño served piping hot from a teensy kettle. I saw how easy it is to let one’s world shrink and shrink and shrink because no risk seems worth taking – because one is trying to do all the right things all the time. How in an effort to be completely and totally safe, one’s life slowly grays out, becomes rigid and shrill. And yet at the same time, how we were lucky – we didn’t get sick.

When my friend introduced me to free birth via this story, I was initially horrified. It sounded insane. Reckless. How does someone do this? I asked her. How does someone get to this point?

“Ask your doctor”

When we returned to the U.S., I started reading everything I could about free birth.

I read books on homebirth and midwifery and birth culture; I read studies in anthropology and sociology and bioethics on obstetric violence and female autonomy in medical systems; I read scientific research about electronic fetal monitoring and c-sections and episiotomies and induction and common hospital practices.

And I binged the Free Birth Society podcast. I listened to hundreds upon hundreds of hours of women talking about how they’d shed their social conditioning and given birth on their bathroom floor, alone and ecstatic; or off the grid in a cabin in Montana, with a fire burning and a shag rug and a psychedelic spiral deep into the portal; or in Copenhagen or Paris, tucked up in an apartment where normcore passerby in the street below had no idea a woman in their midst was howling her way through a primal rite of passage.

I started out mocking and incredulous and became, over the course of my immersion, indignant and transfixed.

Indignant because my research revealed what I’d skirted the surface of in my second book: outrageous levels of birth trauma and obstetric violence around the world; dangerous and damaging hospital practices still being peddled as “evidence-based medicine” in spite of any actual evidence.

Transfixed because the women’s stories were so raw, so mesmerizing. Transfixed because in the face of intense shame and judgment and against every social norm, these women did what they believed was best for themselves and their children. When most women – myself 100 percent included - are scared of deviating from the status quo even when they feel in their guts that it is harming their children and degrading their lives, these women did not give a f*ck. They owned their experience, completely – they were, in their words, “sovereign.”

On the one hand, according to everything our culture teaches, this was nuts. Nothing should be undertaken anymore without expert guidance, and nothing related to babies should ever involve any risk, ever (even though our government does very little to regulate consumer goods, cosmetics, supplements, air and water quality, pesticides, the tech industry, and so on, and we allow countless problematic chemicals banned elsewhere in the developed world).

On the other hand, this was basic. The most basic act: giving birth to one’s child. And this was how Free Birth Society portrayed it, as the simplest, most natural behavior, overcomplicated and co-opted by a voracious medical system more interested in control and domination than assistance.

The podcast became a refuge. In the intensely polarized Covid and post-Covid days, the left seemed to fall into an almost fetishistic relationship with science and the medical system.

“Doctors are Gods,” Saldaya said on one podcast, and the metaphor, intended like everything else she did to provoke, shocked me by making sense. There is a mainstream tendency in the U.S. to treat doctors like priests: sacred, all-knowing, incontrovertible.

“Ask your doctor,” goes the refrain, in advertisements and New York Times articles, in any discussion of health and illness. Amy Schumer made a skit on the theme for Comedy Central. “Ask your doctor if birth control is right for you,” the skit begins, “Ask your boss. Ask your boss to ask his priest. Find a boy scout and see what he thinks. Tap a mailman on the shoulder…then, ask him if birth control is right for you! Ask an old black man and an Asian boy playing chess in the park…Ask your mom’s new boyfriend…ask the Supreme Court.”

Ask your doctor. Some doctors are lovely, sensitive, empathic, intuitive, brilliant. Some doctors are arrogant, ignorant, presumptuous, dogmatic, dangerous. Some doctors are highly attuned to the nuances of individuals and to the dangers of overtreatment or universal treatment; some are affronted by any questioning of their “expertise.” Some value consent, even when it makes them uncomfortable; some cannot countenance that a patient could have a belief, need, or opinion that might override their decision.

And doctors are often wrong. Sometimes out of innocence and good intentions – the science shifted, the studies are now showing the opposite, this treatment is now known to cause harm. But sometimes out of arrogance, not listening (to women and people of color in particular), not exercising enough diligence or care, not paying close enough attention, or simply being entrenched in their own fixed beliefs and assumptions.

The same goes with science: science can be a force for social good and human flourishing, eradicating illnesses and excavating the roots of persistent problems and offering deep and illuminating revelations about our world.

But science can also be corrupt, flawed, weak, biased, uncertain, subject to misinterpretation, and straight-up wrong. Science can be liberating and apolitical and revelatory, and science can be bought and partisan and compromised.

“Believe science,” the popular liberal bumper sticker and invocation, is intended as a well-meaning plea to trust the unvarnished truth of data, but can also inadvertently read as a kind of mystical, religious incantation: believe, believe. Follow your Gods. If we all believed all the science, there would be no science.

Too much credulity is dangerous; this is easy to understand in the context of influencers, but rarely considered in the context of mainstream medicine. Women follow their doctor’s advice, often against their instincts and will; they “do what’s best for the baby,” and they end up with unnecessary inductions, hideous labors, traumatic surgeries, separated from their babies and riddled with guilt and doubt.

Then, they’re gaslit: “If you wouldn’t have gone to the hospital, you would have died.” Sometimes, this is true. Oftentimes, women realize that what harmed them was precisely going to the hospital, and if they’d been left alone (or with midwives) they would’ve been better off.

This is where we get into the conundrum of the Free Birth Society. They represent this particularly sinister era of American capitalism: they have identified a real problem with the mainstream medical system and the way it fails and sometimes outright abuses patients – but their solution has then been to use the potency of their insights to straight-up scam and lie to women in order to make as much money as possible.

Just say no

I loved the Free Birth Society podcast. I could not get enough. I couldn’t stand Emilee (even her name is like dry sand in a bra) but the stories were, well, medicine. That’s what she called them, and that’s what they were – for me, and for many women.

Pregnancy and motherhood in U.S. medical culture can be an intense experience of subjugation and belittlement. Some of my most empowering moments as a mother have come from rejecting this culture: smiling and lying to the pediatrician when she asked if I co-slept, and proceeding to co-sleep for three years, saving myself the misery of trying to put my distressed and wailing baby in a crib while I pretended to rest.

To hear women stand up so boldly to the establishment and do what they felt was best in spite of intense judgement and pressure felt incantatory. It became like a drug I needed to make my own choices.

Me, a fortysomething woman, just beginning to really claim what is mine. I started saying “no” a lot more often to doctors and dentists – no, I don’t want X-rays every six months, especially when no other developed country on earth has this practice – and discovered exactly what the Free Birth Society had warned: consent is often an illusion in the medical context.

I was coerced and threatened almost every time I said no, and these were low-pressure situations. Sometimes I was told by a nurse or PA that she’d “have to check if that was alright,” as if the doctor needed to authorize my own choice about what medicine to take or procedure to undergo.

Saying no during birth is nearly impossible: at best, a woman is fearmongered (doctors play what medical anthropologists and ethicists have called the “dead baby card”) and at worst, she could be punished with legal consequences.

I discovered that a lot of folks on the left are very uncomfortable with any questioning of the medical system. Even people who’ve had less-than-optimal experiences, especially with regards to women’s health, and who can recall multiple doctors who ignored them or put their health at risk, remain reluctant to question the “ask your doctor” paradigm, perhaps largely for fear of how red-coded that has become, how it can instantly flag you as someone trying to cure cancer with celery juice.

Instead, many on the left paint medicine as a tidy, linear evolution towards ever greater human progress, with doctors engaged in an ongoing noble war against unscientific grifters.

In an op-ed for the New York Times entitled “Why the Free Birth Movement’s Popularity Threatens Public Health,” Jessica Grose explains, “the basis for so much of what we’re seeing today started in the 19th century, when medicine began to professionalize and the American Medical Association started to create universal standards.” According to Grose, this “professionalization” of medicine both threatened and emboldened “alternative” quacks, of whom the free birthers are descendants.

This neat good-guys-versus-bad-guys history of medicine ignores the fact that obstetrics in particular was a death trap for women throughout the 19th century because of puerperal (“childbirth”) fever: infection caused by a physician sticking his hand around in a cadaver and then putting that same, unwashed hand into a laboring woman.

Though doctors in the early 19th century speculated about why male physicians had much poorer outcomes than female midwives (spoiler alert: midwives washed their hands and/or did not insert them in women!), the medical establishment refused to acknowledge the causes of puerperal fever until germ theory was finally widely accepted at the turn of the 20th century. Puerperal fever, an entirely iatrogenic illness, was the second leading cause of death for young women in the 19th century, behind only tuberculosis.

The rise of obstetrics was also an often deeply racist attempt to gain a little more ground in a territory not yet ceded to the medical establishment. Ordinary Insanity details the story of how obstetricians slandered “granny” and immigrant midwives (almost exclusively women of color) at the turn of the twentieth century, labeling them filthy and “unscientific” in the aim of fear-mongering women into hospitals, despite the fact that these had much higher maternal and infant mortality rates than midwife-attended home births (only in the second half of the twentieth century, after granny midwives had been thoroughly driven out of business, would these statistics begin to shift).

Hospitals were particularly dangerous for infants, with infant morbidity and mortality due to excessive obstetric intervention rising by 40-50% from 1915 to 1930, as more women were pushed into hospital births. Obstetricians distinguished themselves from midwives by enthusiastically employing technologies like vacuums and forceps, often to the detriment of the baby.

And then there’s everything that comes in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s: women forced to have their genitals shaved to give birth; forced to birth in stirrups; forced into “twilight sleep” or general anesthesia (like my grandmother) because it was considered uncouth for them to be present (and why would they want to be anyway?); fathers forbidden in delivery rooms; babies yanked out and held upside down or smacked vigorously at birth (one hideous current ad in Oaxaca City for an ob-gyn clinic features the OB, fully clad in scrubs, holding a screaming infant upside down by one hand). Or we could get into the story of thalidomide. (If you want an absolutely haunting book of fiction about thalidomide and the medicalization of childbirth, here you go.)

Those who, like Grose, mock or dismiss the natural childbirth movement as a hippie-dippie anti-science fantasy forget the brutal, dehumanizing, and blatantly misogynistic conditions from which it emerged.

The misinformation playbook

In the comments section on Grose’s piece, a man named Howard writes, “It’s simple…Don’t get your 10 minutes on the free birth internet site mixed up with my 4 years of medical school, 4 years of obstetrics and gynecology training in a major busy university medical center and 3 years of high risk maternal fetal medicine fellowship training at a major university hospital.”

Don’t get confused, sweetheart. Don’t get mixed up, little lady. You just hush right on up and do what I tell you.

A woman named “Carrie” writes back, “Howard, your attitude reminds me a lot of the doctor who insisted that we start pitocin when I asked if we could wait, since my induction was only because I was 40 years old, and not for any real medical reason. My 8-year-old is coping well with the brain injury she received as a result, and with physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy, she is making great strides. But I can’t help thinking all of that could have been avoided if the doctor had just listened to me for a minute 8 years ago.”

The concept of “doing your own research” is roundly mocked, with nice liberal families making little cardboard gravestones on their lawns for Halloween that read “Did her own research.” Never mind the mass medication of children with stimulants despite evidence that their effects disappear after three years, and that they significantly affect growth and, potentially, mood as well. Never mind the millions of women prescribed exotic cocktails of psychiatric drugs that have proven so hellish to taper off that whole industries have cropped up online offering support. Never mind the opioid epidemic, in which millions of doctors, some well-meaning, some not so much, handed out incredibly powerful drugs like candy and destroyed people’s lives. Never mind the persistent lies of the pharmaceutical industry about said drugs, and the mere slap on the wrist they received for killing millions of Americans. (When Jorge and I moved to the U.S. in 2010, two different doctors insisted on giving him oxycontin prescriptions: one for tooth pain, one for a headache. He had an instinct and didn’t take it.)

Emily Oster, who became a bugbear of the left when she voiced her opinion that closing schools during Covid was a mistake, recently wrote what I found to be a very helpful and surprising piece on this “do your own research” conundrum for the New York Times.

Oster gives the example of fluoride, which was long taken to be a universal win for public health. Strong data have shown that high fluoride levels have a neurological impact on kids, and one compelling study from this year showed correlations even with lower levels of fluoride. This is pretty troubling when one considers that water across the U.S. is fluoridated (again, the U.S. deviates here from standard practice across Europe and in other developed countries) and most kids use fluoridated toothpaste.

Oster does not browbeat parents who may be skeptical of fluoride as victims of “misinformation” or as hapless souls who just don’t understand science. She suggests that doctors discuss this topic with nuance, honoring parents’ concerns as legitimate, framing them in terms of what different studies show.

This is a radical deviation from the playbook much of the media and its go-to experts seem to have relied on from Covid onwards: deny that there is any risk at all or pooh-pooh it as so minimal as to be ridiculous, suggest that people who worry about said risk have been tragically misinformed and led astray, ignore or delegitimize any science/evidence that complicates this simple equation, and create a straightforward narrative so people aren’t “confused.”

In a recent NYT piece about how the FDA has decided to place warnings on fluoride supplements based on significant evidence of harm from fluoride at high levels, the experts interviewed (in this case, dentists) lamented that patients now have some hesitancy about fluoride – that they come in asking questions, that they are nervous. “It’s unnecessary,” one dentist said, clearly frustrated. “And frankly, based on misinformation.”

But how can these same people who constantly chasten patients to follow science and listen to the experts then turn around and decide that science and experts who contradict the status quo of their established practices are now suddenly “misinformation”?

Oster’s argument is that if doctors and experts do not concede complexity in areas like fluoride, where there is legitimate uncertainty about where the safe dose ends and the danger begins, then they will ultimately lose the trust of people who will go on to become skeptical of even the most basic and life-saving interventions, like the MMR vaccine.

If anything that challenges the status quo as established by “experts” is tarred with the accusation of “misinformation,” ignored, and denied, then guess what starts to look like misinformation?

Last year, I pitched a story to one of the big, old guard, legacy media magazines. It was about birth influencers on Instagram: not Free Birth Society, but women of color sounding the alarm about routine, toxic, and dangerous practices harming women (especially women of color) at hospitals across the U.S. The editor interested in the pitch was lovely, and we had a lengthy phone conversation about it. I wrote it up per our plans and sent it to her. A little while later, I received a response: the other editors were worried that I was promoting “misinformation” by privileging influencers over “doctors and experts.”

I sent the editor citations for multiple peer-reviewed scientific studies showing the danger of practices like electronic fetal monitoring (the New York Times published a feature just last month finally highlighting the risks of EFM and the lack of evidence for its routine use, calling it “the worst test in medicine.”).

These are the kinds of issues these women are highlighting, I explained. They’re referring to the studies. They’re using research. They aren’t lying or encouraging women never to seek medical help or take outlandish measures, like FBS. They’re informing them of risks and contexts that their doctors are not mentioning at all or dismissing out of hand.

The way birth is done in the U.S. is actually not evidence-based, I argued, and the experts we keep returning to for guidance can actually be quite extreme and dogmatic in their ideas about what is safe and what is risky.

Yet the only way the piece would work, I was told, was if I used “experts” to frame and explain the conversation, clarifying what was “misinformation” and what was not. But what, I countered, if an “influencer” (who was also a birth professional) was actually as much of an expert as, say, a labor and delivery nurse? What if the nurse, like the nurse who attended my unmedicated birth, has never actually seen a labor without interventions, while the influencer has attended dozens? Many obstetricians have never witnessed a birth outside of the hospital, not hurried or interrupted or monitored or altered, so how are they the authorities on home birth?

Many are also, just like random average women and influencers, swayed by belief: belief that the body is dangerous, that it cannot be trusted. Many see frightening outcomes but rarely connect these outcomes to their own manipulations and mistrust, or to the particular setting in which they work.

The story was intended to be in part about the way we frame expertise, and the power dynamics involved, and how if women don’t trust experts because experts have failed them, bringing in yet more experts to explain why experts are indeed correct is unlikely to be convincing.

Instead, it could have the opposite effect: women will become so disenchanted by being browbeaten and condescended to by experts that they’ll turn not just to the moderate, reasoned influencer citing scientific studies, but to the one telling them never to trust any medical professional at all.

But this questioning got a hard pass from the editors. The story died. The only type of story that is acceptable, it seems, is the one about the women with the dead babies, who were radicalized by their avoidance of experts. Who did their own research, poor dears.

The canary

I deeply admire the women who make the choice to free birth. I met one by chance for the first time in real life this past spring in Spain; a young immigrant mother who birthed all her children alone in her house in the Santa Cruz mountains. She was one of the most relaxed, sweet, comfortable, confident mothers I’ve ever met. Her kids were wild, happy, brave, free. Without ever being combative or rude, she did not care what anyone thought of her.

These are the stories we do not hear in the mainstream media about free birth: the women whose lives and experience of motherhood are profoundly impacted for the better. The women who come into motherhood not as many of us do – in anxiety, trepidation, and people-pleasing – but sure of who they are and what they want, need, and believe, and how to care for their children.

This is not to say it’s necessary to free birth to achieve such an outcome! But rather, that the way most of us do end up birthing is often pretty antithetical to choice, ease, confidence, and empowerment. Often, women emerge from this crucible not competent and capable but weak, vulnerable, and humbled into perpetual submission.

I was wary of how the Guardian would approach free birth, but the writers seem to have taken great care to get to know this community and to really listen to free-birthing women about their choices, and to acknowledge the difference between free birth as a practice and the dogma and rhetoric of the Free Birth Society.

They do interview experts, but all are midwives, a choice that feels thoughtful and intentional. They also are careful to point out that free birth is generally low risk, and that what Free Birth Society advocates is a particularly extreme and dangerous version of the practice, in which women are encouraged never to have contact with medical providers even in very troubling situations, like after ten days of obstructed labor.

The writers do put the phrase “obstetric violence” in scare quotes, which seems at best misguided and at worst condescending, seeing as even the WHO has highlighted an epidemic of obstetric violence around the world. The studies I’ve read about obstetric violence are truly horrifying: women given episiotomies without consent, held down or forced into denigrating positions by doctors and nurses, obligated to get epidurals or inductions despite repeated refusals, and in the worst cases, sterilized against their will. A 2019 study in the journal Health and Human Rights on obstetric violence in Latin America by a Harvard anthropologist declared, “Scenes of violence against women in labor are the norm, not the exception.”

Despite this slipup, the article’s overall nuance has generated a thoughtful conversation about what drives women to such extremes. One NHS midwife wrote in an editorial response to the article, “The loss of access to and respect for autonomous midwifery, its descent into obstetric nursing, is a raging western misogynist tragedy, resulting in both heinous obstetric violence and the Russian roulette of free birthing.”

I have long been attracted to these big, hard questions of risk and safety and purpose. We live in a society that is obsessed with research and data and numbers on pages, with experts and professionals and academics, all of whom define for us what is safe and what is dangerous and how to live a good life.

But how to live a good life is rarely a question merely of safety. It isn’t something that can be calculated, measured, itemized, optimized, systematized, broken down into pragmatic bits and checklists.

The older I get, the more I realize that the mainstream American idea of what a good life looks like – status, money, and stuff, leading to more status, money, and stuff – isn’t actually conducive to either meaning or happiness. That meaning oftentimes comes from the biggest risks, the hardest choices, the discovery of one’s own autonomy amidst great pressure to conform.

In my project about free birth, the central questions are: what do we lose when a certain kind of “safety” is our only focus and obsession, even at the cost of our intuition and autonomy and sense of deep meaning? How much is worth risking for freedom from a culture that often seems dedicated not to women’s liberation, but to their submission?

Cults become cults because they speak to a deep and unmet longing, to an unvoiced social ill. In this case, it is the way motherhood is often treated as a purely medical/scientific/technological problem with purely medical/scientific/technological solutions, and not as a profound ritual and transformation a woman might want to treat as, dare I say, sacred, or at least as emotionally and psychologically significant.

In fact, we tend to treat most aspects of our lives in the contemporary United States this way: as technical problems with technical solutions. There’s an app for that. A prescription for that. Is it research-backed? Science-based? Did you ask your doctor?

Many of us are very detached from our bodies, distrustful even of them, and reliant on experts and outsiders to tell us if we’re okay: making the right choices, obeying the right rules.

What FBS offered was the promise of reclamation: you can do it yourself. You must, in fact, do it yourself. You don’t need anyone to tell you you’re okay, to tell you you’re safe, to tell you what to do and how to do it. You instead do the deep, dark, incredibly difficult work of believing in yourself.

Where they lied was in avowing that this is always, only, the way; that there is never a time for fear or help.

It’s this contentious and rich middle ground our culture seems to have largely abandoned. My own birth was wonderful: unmedicated, in a hospital but with a home birth midwife, largely undisturbed. Under the influence of FBS I went through a brief phase when I started to doubt whether or not it was actually as good as I thought, but I shook myself clear of that.

Had I known what I know now, I would’ve declined the electronic fetal monitoring that left me confined to the bed late in labor. I would’ve declined the eye ointment that is not routinely used on all newborns in any country except the U.S., and which exposes the newborn to powerful antibiotics within hours of birth. Both of these refusals would have likely led to combat and resentment – perhaps even to threats – and made my experience far less pleasant.

But overall, my birth was an experience of autonomy, dignity, and heartbreaking beauty. The midwife didn’t fearmonger when I had meconium in my amniotic fluid, she helped me change positions to speed up my labor, my baby was born bright red and screaming, and I was ecstatic. I had wanted a home birth, but we were living in a tiny cabin in middle-of-nowhere Ohio at the time, and I thought it too risky.

Several women I’ve met since then have called this a “unicorn birth.” I find this incredibly tragic. How is having a birth in which my choices (and not even all of them!) were honored and I was given time, space, quiet, and respect, rare as a unicorn? How have we resigned ourselves to this? How can we fight so hard in other spheres and surrender our autonomy so easily in this one?

The anthropologist Robbie Floyd-Davis has called birth a “technocratic rite of passage.” It’s when we’re initiated into trusting and submitting to medical and technological systems, often at our own expense, no matter what. For most of us, it’s how we’ll live the rest of our lives.

I wonder if I had found FBS back then, I would have chosen to stay in the cabin instead of going to the hospital. I wonder if I would’ve birthed by myself in that clawfooted tub in the wild riot of country summer and said no then and there to all the pressure and all the fear and all the browbeating and all the selling of nonsense and learned what instead it’s taken me a decade to learn. I also wonder if something terrible would have happened. I can’t know.

But I do know where I’ve landed – in a lonesome space in which I recognize the lies and false promises of the influencers as well as those of the medical system, and I fear a rising polarization that suffocates any nuance.

There will be another FBS, and another, each crazier than the last with its promises and its “offerings,” because the more dissent feels dangerous, the more ideologically rigid we grow, the more the supposedly pragmatic is elevated above all else, the more susceptible people will become to what feels, finally, like truth. The more people will crave what has been marked as taboo.

We should understand FBS not as an aberration, a freakish creation of the Internet, but as the proverbial canary: singing us a haunting song about what we long for, fear, give up, and ultimately choose not to see.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?