Melbourne wellness influencer found short of breath and clammy after home birth hours before death

As staff worked on her, Lal provided them with details of the birth, making them suspicious her role in the birth was more than just that of a friend as she had told them, Ellyard said.

“Money changed hands” when Lal became Warnecke’s birthkeeper, Ellyard told the coroner.

After surgery, Warnecke suffered from a further cardiac arrest and died shortly after 11am.

“Ms Lal left the hospital and went back to the house to clean up,” Ellyard said.

“It might have been part of services contracted to provide this clean up, and it is not clear if any thought was given to any investigation into the circumstances of Stacey’s death that might have required the scene to be left undisturbed.”

Lal is due to give evidence to the coroner on Tuesday, on the condition she be granted protection from self-incrimination. Ellyard said Lal had not provided a statement to the court.

One clinician who treated Warnecke at Frankston hospital described in her statement how the only women she cared for who died from obstetric haemorrhage “were in the third world”, Ellyard said.

The forensic pathologist who conducted Warnecke’s autopsy, Dr Michael Burke, told the coroner that he specifically listed the cause of death as postpartum haemorrhage “in the setting of a freebirth” because it is “rare” for women to die from this when they give birth in a medical facility.

“A woman who dies from blood loss … it is eminently treatable if it’s recognised quickly and managed,” he said during his evidence on Monday.

Ellyard said while Warnecke was “her own person making her own choices”, the function of a coronial inquest is to understand if changes can be made to protect public health and prevent future deaths.

Her choice to give birth outside the health system “was not a unique one” and there are a “growing number of women making the choice to forgo traditional medical care to give birth … assisted with knowledge largely acquired online,” Ellyard said.

Ellyard said it is hard to know how many women choose unassisted freebirth because if those births go well, they don’t come to the attention of medical professionals.

“But the number of medical cases that come to the attention of medical services is increasing, with very serious and tragic outcomes,” Ellyard said.

It was placing a “significant burden on medical services when called to respond to emergencies”, Ellyard said, and in Warnecke’s case her lack of contact with the medical system meant information about any pre-existing conditions to help guide care was nonexistent.

The inquest, to be heard over the next five days, will examine many elements, including whether Warnecke would have survived her complications with earlier access to medical intervention, and the advice and sources of information she used in planning for Axel’s birth.

Ellyard said Warnecke was afraid of being pushed into receiving unnecessary and potentially traumatic interventions such as a caesarean if she gave birth in hospital.

Ellyard told the coroner that Warnecke and her husband were both concerned by vaccine mandates during the Covid-19 pandemic, and “her research led her to decide she wasn’t comfortable with ultrasounds, or testing for gestational diabetes”.

She was described to the court as a vibrant, active and educated woman who was tertiary educated as a nutritionist, and who liked to do her own research including into her pregnancy.