Whose Body Is It

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⁠⁠1:1 Guidance with Isabella Malbin⁠⁠

Sia grew up in a Muslim family in Brooklyn, immersed in a faith she genuinely loved while also learning that the Quran was the literal word of God. But as she got older, questions about what Islam taught about women, violence, apostasy, and obedience became harder to silence.

She takes us through the experiences that ultimately led her to leave Islam—including confronting verses she couldn't reconcile with her own moral compass, secretly questioning the faith as a teenager, and eventually telling her parents she was no longer Muslim and attracted to women.

She also opens up about the complicated experience of distancing herself from family, including a period of no contact with her mother.

But Sia's story doesn't end with leaving Islam. After finding a home in the queer community, she began encountering ideas about sex and gender that created the same uneasy feeling she had experienced as a child: something doesn't make sense, but everyone is telling me I have to believe it anyway. We talk about her growing doubts about transgender ideology, her decision to become publicly gender-critical, the social costs of dissent and cancel culture, and why she ultimately came to identify as a Zionist after October 7.

This is a conversation about what happens when you stop silencing your intuition and overriding your own inner voice in order to belong.

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1:1 Guidance with Isabella Malbin

Growing up in England immersed in second-wave feminism, and later climate crisis narratives, overpopulation fears, and media portrayals of birth as traumatic and dangerous, Lucy absorbed the idea that motherhood was a low-status path — something she would never want for herself.

Underneath those stories was something even deeper: a dislike of herself, compounded by years on hormonal birth control and cultural messaging framing female reproduction as punishment rather than power.  Lucy reflects on never holding a baby until she was 24, living for decades disconnected from her body, and how stories about motherhood shaped her identity long before she ever questioned them.

I share why, despite growing up in a similar cultural soup in New York City I always knew I wanted to be a mother.

Lucy also opens up about the unexpected transformation that happened in her 40s after two decades on hormonal birth control.

Through our coaching work together, we discovered that Lucy subconsciously feared that wanting even more happiness through motherhood might somehow threaten the incredible relationship she already had with her husband. Could life really get any better? It turns out, it could.

Lucy reflects on the strange tension of being aware of declining fertility statistics at age 44 while simultaneously tracking her biomarkers, seeing healthy cycles on paper, and feeling more vital than ever.

We also explore how easily Lucy could have become vulnerable to the fear-based, predatory marketing of the fertility industry had she been single and desperate for children in her 30s — and why she never even considered engaging with “Big Fertility” once she learned how to track her cycle and move through the subconscious fears that had shaped her for decades.

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In 2022, Mary Lou Singleton and I released an episode titled: What will happen to women if medical abortion is criminalized?

We discussed medical totalitarianism, snitch culture post 2020, period tracking apps, state surveillance of women’s menstrual cycles throughout history, forced abortions, the harms of pharmaceutical contraception and the difficulty of trying to legislate morality.

Since that episode aired, our feelings about abortion have changed.

DISCLAIMER This isn’t a 180 episode — you won’t hear us scream “abortion is murder!!” however, we do discuss abortion as a kind of child sacrifice.

This episode isn’t about the legality of abortion.

It’s about what abortion is, isn’t, and what it has come to mean for women.

We step back to ask the questions that often get glossed over in the abortion debate such as:What is sex for?

We explore how abortion has in some circles become a cultural sacrament—tied to ideas of freedom, identity, and what it means to live fully as a FREE woman.

We acknowledge the real grievances that led many women to fight for abortion access, and why that fight felt necessary.

But we also ask at what cost, and whether the narrative we’ve inherited (from both sides) has left women with the full truth.

From generational memories of unsafe, illegal abortions to today’s pressures around career, social status, and delayed motherhood, we hope you find this conversation holds complexity without collapsing into extremes.

We talk about the women often left out of the conversation: the ambivalent majority—and ask harder questions about what drives most abortions, the role of cultural expectations, and the systems that profit from them (selling aborted fetal cells to med spas + funding Big Pharma.)

We honor women in vastly different circumstances, including those for whom abortion feels like the only viable option.

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2022 abortion episode: What will happen to women if abortion is criminalized?

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Elizabeth quietly shaped underground unassisted birth communities not to build a brand or make money, but to help women heal their trauma.

Long before social media exploded, Elizabeth warned women about the risks of joining unassisted birth groups online, even as she worked within underground networks to educate women about birth.

We explore the oxymoron of selling free birth, why some women succeed at unassisted birth while others transfer, how individual women’s realities collide with group dynamics. What used to unify these communities—before they were torn apart by the gender identity insanity in 2014?

Finally, we examine our cultural obsession with birth photography and why people want to witness birth. Despite these images serving as powerful (good) propaganda for home birth, what are the hidden costs for mothers, babies, and women’s liberation as a whole?

Elizabeth's Blog

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In this episode Laura Shanley shares the deeply personal journey that led her to write Unassisted Childbirth -originally titled The Joy of Childbirth- a book published in 1994 that has since found its way into over 1,000 libraries worldwide.

Long before “free birth” was a movement or an identity, Laura was navigating the path of unassisted childbirth largely alone—choosing unassisted birth for her five children in the 1970s and 80s without ever knowingly having met another woman who had done the same.

Inspired by Grantly Dick-Read’s Childbirth Without Fear -the book her future husband was reading the very night they met - Laura’s philosophy was shaped by her intuition, pursuit of spirituality and a higher consciousness, and a refusal to accept fear-based narratives around birth.

Laura discusses how her work gained attention: including the pressure to turn her book into a “how-to manual,” and to write about who should and shouldn’t birth unassisted…lines she felt were never her place to draw. Many of the unassisted births she documents in her book and website weren’t even intentional, but instead the natural result of fast, pleasurable labors. 

While Laura found allies like HypnoBirthing founder Marie Mongan, she also faced fierce criticism from midwives and the medical community, especially after experiencing a stillbirth, an event her detractors seized on as proof that unassisted birth leads to tragedy.

The episode closes with Laura’s reflections on free birth subculture, infant loss, and what is lost when complex human experiences are flattened into dogma.

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Unassisted Childbirth Website

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Freya Kellet—once deeply immersed in free birth society ideology—gradually reshaped her beliefs through working with women and during her pregnancy and birth of her son.

Feeling the pressure of the invisible “judgment day” of whether her birth would be “successful,” she faced the emotional weight of being publicly vocal about free birth while privately navigating uncertainty.

As she made peace with the possibility of interventions, even a c-section, Freya discovered a more grounded trust in herself. Her identity, her relationship with her son, and the health of her marriage would not be determined by the outcome of a single birth experience.

Freya, the first student to enroll in the Radical Birth Keeper School in 2020, reflects on what drew her into unassisted childbirth online communities and how her views have evolved since.

Our conversation dives into the nuance of free birth dogma versus unassisted birth supported by first-aid knowledge and contingency plans, the role of biomechanics, and whether home birth “failures” can really be blamed on a lack of surrender or inner work.

We also share our reactions to the recent Guardian article and what it revealed about the loss of nuance within free birth spaces. This episode may challenge, trigger, or unsettle listeners but we’ve done our best to examine hard questions with honesty and compassion.

Most importantly, Freya shares her biggest transformation: not just a shift in beliefs, but a profound change in how she relates to other women—especially birthing mothers, free from freebirth™.

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Freya's Birth Story

Substack Bonus: Isabella's Birth Work Journey, Grief, Regrets and Recs for Aspiring Birth Keepers (recorded March 2025)

The Guardian Article

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Days before teaching her women and girls safeguarding class, Amy Sousa was given a stage-three breast cancer diagnosis. Suddenly confronted with the very realities she had long analyzed, Amy found herself facing the possibility of losing a breast and being urged toward a radical double mastectomy.

Amy details why she refused, what her independent research revealed about treatment statistics most women never hear, and how she was told not to worry because she’d like her new saline breasts even better.

Amy dismantles myths around survival rates for lumpectomy versus mastectomy and examines the broader glamorization of harm—how beauty, status, and even self-destructive medical choices are marketed as aspirational.

We also explore how medicalization of our female bodies blurs personal boundaries and Amy discusses how this tension can serve to sharpen our instincts and strengthen collective resistance to men in women’s spaces.

We reflect on moments of everyday courage recently demonstrated by Tish Hyman who went viral for confronting a man in the women’s locker room at Gold’s Gym in LA. We explore ways to hone our community responses and specifically what parents can do to keep their kids out of the trans cult.

This episode calls listeners back to the wisdom of our mammalian instincts for both safety and procreation, and offer strategies for how to eat the transgender insanity from the inside out.

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⁠Keep Your Kids Out of The Trans Cult⁠

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As a Creighton-trained OBGYN and surgeon, Dr. Naomi Whittaker didn’t enter this field because she liked what she saw — she wanted to change it. Her personal story runs very deep: her grandmother died after a C-section in communist Poland, and decades later, Dr. Whittaker found herself confronted with the same unnecessary major abdominal surgery.

We discuss the epigenetic roots of endometriosis, the rebranding of infertility as a “disease,” and the urgent need to prioritize safe over merely “effective” interventions.

Dr. Whittaker also reveals the hidden economics of fertility care, everything from insurance reimbursement loopholes to the industry’s total lack of accountability for both maternal and infant mobility and mortality.

She shares how women suffering from endometriosis can vet their surgeon, what dignified reproductive care should look like, and offers a compassionate message for women who regret freezing their eggs.

For those struggling to conceive, she reminds us that the female drive to nurture and create extends far beyond procreation. This is an episode for anyone ready to rethink what real women’s healthcare could look like, when it’s grounded in truth, ethics, and humanity.

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⁠Know in 4hrs: Decide whether or not to freeze your eggs, do IVF or surrogacy

Dr. Whittaker's Resources

Explore the Restorative Reproductive Medicine Academy

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Michigan-based female physiologist Sarah shares her journey from being a proudly non-monogamous, sex-positive liberal feminist to a woman reclaiming her body, fertility, and longing for motherhood.

Raised by a single mother who helped shape her world view, she built her trauma healing practice based on an ideology that promised freedom but instead delivered disconnection — from men who truly respect women and from her female body. 

Sarah opens up about leaving the polyamorous world, witnessing the aftermath of the covid shots in her clinical practice, and facing backlash for simply using the word woman.

After years of deprogramming and somatic-based healing, Sarah stands in her truth while continuing to support women of varying ideological beliefs who have been chewed up and spit out by the western medical model, and is ready to conceive for the first time at the age of 44, shedding the lies of overpopulation and climate doom and embracing motherhood as the most radical act of body reclamation. 

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⁠Know in 4hrs: Decide whether or not to freeze your eggs, do IVF or surrogacy

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What does liberation feel like in the body and how do we know when we’ve mistaken violence or an ideology for freedom?

In this episode, Tara Rae Behr shares her journey from an evangelical upbringing, where purity culture and child rearing looked like spanking and lots of shame, to almost leaving psychotherapy to pursue a career in “conscious sex work.”

Like many women disentangling themselves from extreme religious upbringings, Tara wondered if there was something healing in re-enacting violence through sex or if liberation could be found by swinging to the opposite end of the spectrum.

While confronting the scandals of evangelical leaders like Ted Haggard as well as her own mentorship with a BDSM “therapist,” Tara discovered that both purity culture and liberal pro-prostitution views of the body and sexuality are in fact distortions of true intimacy.

Through MDMA-assisted therapy, Tara began recovering suppressed memories of childhood abuse, leading her to confront her parents and break ties with a BDSM mentor. In this deeply reflective conversation, Tara explores what it means to discern right from wrong outside of dogma, how much of her religious upbringing still informs her moral compass, and how she now envisions sexuality beyond objectification.

Tara asks how we can befriend ourselves, reclaim intimacy with our own bodies, and reconnect with the Earth—instead of falling into the abyss of the transhumanist vision of the body as a forever modifiable machine.

⁠⁠p.s. The things I want to say but don't say live on my substack. Subscribe for $6/month and unlock all premium content →⁠⁠

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