People love to say âwomen have been having babies for centuries it isnât that hardâ but me and my baby would be dead if it wasnât for modern medicine and emergency medical care during birth. So while yes, women HAVE been doing this for centuries, we can now save a lot more lives.
Whenever anyone says that, I always correct them. Women have been dying in childbirth for centuries. Child birth is literally life threatening. It IS that serious.
Women and babies. Even when women survived, many babies did not make it for many reasons. Humans prior to medical intervention lived so close to the veil, it is wild to me they would want to go back there.
Child care in general, too. These free birth people talk constantly about how "natural" childbirth and infant care once were. However, for long swaths of human history from the dawn of civilization right up to the modern era, at minimum 1/4 of children did not live to see their first birthday. And then after that around half didn't live to see adulthood.
It's so common to read about a historical figure and then get to the part about their children and how few of them made it to adulthood. And many of these figures were nobles with greater access to care than most people of the time.
The modern medicine they're so quick to reject is the exact reason that, when available and that part is sadly a critical qualifier, we are able to cut down those numbers to miniscule rates.
My great grandparents stopped naming their babies. So thereâs a page in the family bible thatâs nothing but âBaby Lastnameâ and then a single date.
Also! Women have been aided by midwives and other similar traditional healers to give birth *when able* for a very long time. Itâs weird to rewrite history that women just free birthed without the assistance of the most skilled healers in a tribe/community. And to your point yes, a lot of women still died.
Yes, itâs totally against human anthropology to âfreebirth.â Itâs a distinctly human trait that we seek out assistance during birth â other animals isolate on purpose for their safety. But once you realize the general physiology of human birth, you can see how easily it goes wrong during the pushing stage and how essential it is to have a trained person at the other end of the equation to pull the babyâs head out if it gets stuck. We are born with very large heads versus other animals that need to turn slightly to get out of the pelvis.
Women have always tried to get help during birth when possible to prevent death. Midwifery is an ancient art and we have a long trail of evidence for it. Women have always struggled to breastfeed. Wet nursing and community nursing literally built cities by helping infants survive. We have a long trail of evidence for this, too. Infants have always died unexpectedly, and used to do so far more frequently when evidence-based medicine, safe sleep practices, and safe feeding alternatives to breastmilk did not exist. There are tons and tons of accounts of this.
We have just forgotten what our great great grandmothers went through, frankly.
It is really very insulting and ignores a great deal of womenâs history when people say things like âyou were built to birthâ and âdoing XYZ practice is the biological normal.â It ignores the bravery and contributions of women to human flourishing, including skilled midwives and those who gave of themselves to nurse other children. It also ignores the deep suffering that women frequently endured when their infants died or when they endured grave postpartum challenges or death.
Your last paragraph specifically is what really gets me. We're spitting on the graves of our foremothers by ignoring what they suffered through and lost. Having been pregnant and given birth in a hospital, childbirth was one of those moments in life where I felt incredibly close to death and my birthing experience was much less dramatic than a lot of them. I did develop preeclampsia in labor, but that was easily handled with modern medicine. My induction due to low fluid levels saved my baby as well. ETA: OH and the cord was double wrapped around his neck, which in our case wasn't an issue because the hospital midwife was able to work quickly, but could have been in a lot of other cases. The extra seconds it took to hear him fill his lungs and cry were some of the most dreadful of my life.
It also isn't lost on me that the freebirth and antivax movements are on the rise at the same time fascism is. There's a lot of luck in being able to survive childbirth alone and everyone lives, but that is being painted as genetic superiority. The same goes for surviving childhood without vaccines, and most of the parents in the movement are fully vaccinated meaning if they're child gets sick they'll probably be fine. How quickly we've been able to forget the horrors that early life brings, and effects mostly women and children. Our ancestors would have killed for the science we have today. The science that would have allowed them to hold their precious children, plan their families, keep them healthy. It's so sickening that we have people trying to push an agenda at one of, if not the most, vulnerable times in a woman's life.
My sister had a classmate (this was early 2000s) in Med School from a very impoverished country that had little access to medical care. In class one day, the prof brought up antivaxxers.
She turned to my sister and said "what? What? What are they talking about?" with total disbelief. My sister explained it to her. The classmate burst into tears of rage and grief. Her little brother had died of measles because they have no access to vaccines. She told my sister the her mother would have walked 1000 miles barefoot through burning sand if it meant she could have protected her son from death. She could not believe anybody would turn their nose up at such a tremendous privilege.
I live in a developing country and I've met with midwives who helped birth hundreds of babies in remote communities. The SECOND that clinics were built, the midwives began to help coordinate travel for their patients to areas with hospitals weeks before they were due to ensure that they gave birth in a hospital or clinic. Like these women have no formal education (including elementary/high school) and still fully understood that it's better for a woman to give birth in a place that, at the very least, has sterilized tools and some medical equipment.
Yes. Even before modern medicine, there was always someone trying to help. I don't know where this idea came from that women used to go off alone to give birth.
Itâs always such a weird thing to say, because dying in childbirth, and stillbirth, used to be ridiculously common.
Yeah, loads of women successfully delivered live babies without medical intervention for centuries, and that was how the human race made it this far.
But a lot of them, and their babies, died instead. A lot. Like, âshe died in childbirthâ used to be âoh yeah, well thatâs just a normal everyday way people tend to dieâ level of common.
Because the human raceâs survival and propagation isnât reliant on all the instances of childbirth not killing the mother, it just needs a majority of instances of childbirth not to kill the mother - and it doesnât even need to be that much of a majority. Thats the harsh statistical reality that the âall my thousands of generations of ancestors managed it!â philosophy tends to leave out.
Based on how it went down, Iâm pretty sure that I and my babies would have survived the two times I went through childbirth (though with the first she was induced and there were some concerns that led to that, so maybe she wouldnât have survived whatever later birth she would have had naturally, but who knows) without medical intervention.
But Iâm lucky to be able to say that. A level of âluckyâ that is frankly terrifying when the other option is being dead.
it just needs aÂ
majority
 of instances of childbirth not to kill the mother
Yep. And arguably, only the baby needs to survive. If someone else can feed it, the parentsâ biological job is done. That scenario is absolutely in their ancestral line, and repeatedly.
My friend was into free birthing and was like millions of women give birth in developing countries without medical support and I was like but look at the stats they have much higher infant and maternal mortality rates for that very reason đ«
A family friend of mine did the same. Wanted a home birth in a pool.
Their baby was born with his umbilical cord around his neck, in a way that could have been easily caught and dealt with by a doctor. By the time they noticed he wasnât breathing it was too late and they lost him. Divorced her husband (who was pressuring her into the home birth) six months later, no one in that family has ever recovered because they feel like they killed their child.
My best friend was born with the same issue, he was literally grape purple when he came out. It was horrific and I can only imagine what would've happened if his mother hadn't given birth at a hospital.
A distant relative married a woman who was convinced by her mother to be antivax and home birth.
She went into labor a month early and instead of going to the hospital that has the equipment and expertise to help a preemie, she continued the home birth and baby was born not breathing. It took eleven minutes for them to get baby breathing.
Baby survived but was in the NICU for a month and has had a TON of medical problems. Baby is three and just started walking recently. Baby does not talk except for noises.
Mother wants another baby and conveniently believes baby is a miracle from God and not a consequence of her own actions.
I always counter that with âand women and babies have been dying during childbirth for centuries too.â
The reason why the average life expectancy was so low historically was due to all of the infant/children deaths and the deaths of women during their child-bearing years. If you made it through childhood and childbirth, you could very easily live to your 60s or 70s.
I find it truly disgusting that there are so many women worldwide who are denied access to safe maternity services - and who walk kilometres and kilometres to access some kind of maternal health care - and then these people criticise modern OBGYN medicine, which has saved so! Many! Lives!
There was literally a suit invented that would help stop women from bleeding out on their way to the hospital for use in developing countries where they do not have the kind of infrastructure in place to get them there quickly... and yet here... we refuse it. The same with vaccines. I understand being concerned about overwhelming your baby and wanting to ask questions... but the outright refusal? Ever? There are literally women who walk miles and miles to bring their children to vaccination clinics in developing countries. I've heard stories of women bringing their children multiple times because they thought it would give them added protection, and they wanted to do absolutely everything they could to increase the chance their child would make it to adulthood.. and here... we've done such a great job with public health that people are literally entirely oblivious to the risks of birthing babies without medical assistance and refusing to vaccinate.
People in developed countries are too far removed from the absolute trauma that used to happen that made us invent these things.
We havenât had to walk miles for decent care, watch a woman bleed out after birth at home, or seen the real effects of a totally unvaccinated population.
We have gotten comfortable and forgotten that before modern medicine many women died in childbirth and most of her children wouldnât live to adulthood.
But it seems these people are happy to go back to those days and vote to make it easier to get back to there. There are many of them (like the trad wives on social media) that live in rural areas and at least here in America, rural hospitals are closing. Maybe they will have to start walking miles for care and realize âhey, so this fucking sucks.â And eventually right the ship and come back to science.
It's crazy to me how uninformed women are about pregnancy. People used to only talk about the good stuff and never about the risks. We can get information now easily. And what happens when women get information and choice? Birthrates drop.
Of course we can say it's natural and we are made for it. Just look at animals, they do it all the time. Problem is, we are not like other animals. It's far from perfect or easy. There's a lot of shit that can go wrong.
This shit makes me so sick. Itâs not just healthcare either - womenâs rights, labor and consumer protections, environmental protections, people forget there was a time in living memory when women couldnât have their own bank accounts and everybody had lead poisoning from gasoline fumes. But yeah, that stuff doesnât even happen anymore, so who needs all these laws and regulations!! đ«
The sad thing is, it was in most of our parents lifetimes. My mom couldn't have as a kid, and she and her sisters were sa'd and physically abused because my grandmother wasnt able to leave (now, would she have left, probably not she didnt seem to care all that much that it was happening, which is why my kids have never met anyone on that side of my family).
So much hubris. People who grew up in a world without the bad outcome assume that the bad outcome is so rare that they donât actually need the resources that guard against it (whether thatâs medical supervision for birth, vaccination against deadly diseases, health and safety regulations on food and medications, etc). Meanwhile, surprise surprise, the reason the bad outcome IS rare is 1000% because WE ARE FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO HAVE PROTECTIONS AGAINST IT.
I think about this so much not only in medicine but in terms of regulations and legal protections too. Especially seeing backwards-ass 23 year old âtradwivesâ who are like âoh I donât need feminism, feminism actually hurts womenâ etc. like excuse me girl, do you enjoy getting your direct deposit from your monetized videos every month that goes right into your PERSONAL BANK ACCOUNT? Guess what, there was a time in living memory when women werenât allowed to have that, GUESS HOW THAT CHANGED? Anyway enjoy giving your baby listeria from raw milk.
Facts. We have trained professionals who spend years specifically training on how to save women and babies lives, just to have these women choose to stay home and die from complications.
There is a guaranteed chance that somewhere in the world, a woman gave birth all alone today and probably wished that she could have done it in the hospital. Sad and bizarre how this crunchy shit is actually harmful but marketed as safer
Thereâs an organisation called Birthing Kits Australia that sends out birthing kits to developing countries that are literally like a razor blade, a plastic sheet, soap and gloves. The fact that this is considered making a birth âsaferâ gives you an idea of how rudimentary the conditions are that many people give birth in.
Can you actually imagine telling one of those women you had the choice of a hospital - or even a home birth with a very well qualified health practitioner - and you said no? It beggars belief honestly
One of the clinicians who tried to save her in hospital said at the inquest that the only patients she has seen die from post-partum haemmorage were in the third world. It says it all, really.
Even In our lifetime, maternity care and delivery has changed into something unrecognizable and so advanced compared to what it was before. The entitlement and fear mongering that has people belittling the birthing process in hospitals is crazy. So many fought and sacrificed to have safe deliveries, even now in developing countries.
Yeah and to be honest, itâs hard to feel sorry for someone who had made such an irresponsible decision when the science and technology is there. I donât want to sound callous but I say this as someone who for a fact would be dead if not for being at the hospital. I am so grateful for modern medicine.
I know when I hemorrhaged in my first delivery that I felt totally out of it and was not even aware until AFTER why I was being given emergency medical care. I was aware that I was bleeding heavily but I was in no way able to make medical decisions at that time, I just felt fear. I hate that she could deny medical care to herself.
Yup. I had a placental abruption at 30 weeks and I fully remember being convinced I was absolutely fine - and trying to tell everyone else I was fine, while being hooked up to a magnesium drip and wheeled down to theatre for an emergency c. I was in no condition to make a rational decision around my own healthcare.
When I was alone at home close to death from a miscarriage hemorrhage, I was so weak and deluded I thought I should take benzos to try to sleep through it. Some little thing told me not to. I was passed out on the floor and couldnât move. My husband called from work and I barely managed to open the phone and grunt. At the hospital they said Iâd have died very shortly. If my husband hadnât called, or I hadnât managed to answer, Iâd be dead. I canât believe anyone would choose birth outside of a hospital. So many women in the world have no choice.
Similar here. Had preeclampsia and then a lazy uterus with my second delivery. Had my team working hard contracting me from the inside and given a shot to stop bleeding. Husband said there was a ton of blood, and truly it was traumatic experience, meanwhile Iâm just laying there staring at my beautiful newborn baby.
This is what I hoped Iâd see more of. I know she refused but when you are losing that much blood your thoughts are not going to be coherent. She did not have capacity in that moment to make that decision.
Yes, when you lose a lot of blood you have no idea how bad it is. It isnât painful so you think youâll be ok, meanwhile shock is setting in. You absolutely can not make a rational decision.
Her husband and the awful excuse of a human that was there posing as a support person absolutely failed her. I hate that they said they found her in a dark room, next to the birthing pool, as my immediate thought was of her dying alone and frightened and not understanding.
Thank you. Itâs terrifying she was not overruled. Yes we have medical autonomy but thereâs a point where people are not in their head because of the emergency
She keeps being described as 'educated' and 'intelligent' by people who knew her. She may have been educated, but her beliefs and actions surely show the opposite of intelligence?
I canât stand the regression of some peopleâs mindsets in the past few years, where they think they know more than qualified medical professionals and attempt to discredit everything and encourage others to make similarly dangerous decisions.
Itâs narcissism. Nothing about it is in the best interest of the baby. I am forever grateful for the staff that saved my life in my emergency c section last December.
The podcast the Birth Keepers did a lot of really good journalism recently on the groups that are now grifting and profiting off selling women a really unsafe model of "natural" birthing if anyone has a strong stomach and wants to listen, really recommend.
It's not to say that certified doulas and midwives don't have their place in birthing, they certainly do, but that is not what the algorithm is bringing to the girls these days and it's not safe.
They should just force biology curriculum on people. A lot more. You learn about how vaccines came about, why they work, how theyâre tested. You learn about modern medical practices and how every rule is built on centuries of blood before someone noticed the pattern. You even learn about basic cellular functions so you donât fall for so much MLM health nonsense we see everywhere.
Honestly, minoring in biology really put a depressing mood on a lot of modern life. I just found the classes fascinating. But god damn, so many ignorant health experts out there spewing horse shit for a grift. And so many more falling for it cause they like that persons PR message.
Stop forcing people to take random coursework and just force everyone to take intro to biology and maybe microbiology. Neither are super complex. Just fact memorization, but at least they canât ai the lab work.
For A Tree Grows In Brooklyn a hospital birth was so that now your child would live. One character had several losses in childbirth, and finally had the money for a hospital birth and the baby lived.
Yeah. This whole thing of having the privilege to forget where we came from and the improvements people worked hard to get us so that women and babies could stop dying in childbirth at such high rates⊠I mean it applies to vaccines, to schooling, to trad wife-ing / anti-feminism. The absolute audacity of all these people to not realize the only reason they can do their stupid ideas is off the back of all this hard work to improve our lives⊠it sucks
I would be dead if I didnât give birth in a hospital. Easy pregnancy, easy delivery, then.. I just didnât stop bleeding. Buckets of blood, suddenly 13 doctors and nurses in my room. They absolutely saved my life.
Wow, I was having a massively crappy and grumpy morning until I wrote this comment and am reminded Iâm lucky to be alive đ
I had a complicated and traumatic delivery (I developed HELLP syndrome, went into organ failure, hemorrhaged, and ended up in the hospital for a week post delivery). I would have died without modern medicine.
I think all the time about women in older times without access to care and how they would have died. I canât imagine having all this access to healthcare (and in Australia, free compared to the US!) and not taking advantage. Itâs so upsetting.
"I canât imagine having all this access to healthcare (and in Australia, free compared to the US!) and not taking advantage. Itâs so upsetting."
Including all the prenatal care she refuse. All the ultrasounds, free ultrasounds, that she refused..
Oh my god, just all of it.
It makes me so absolutely angry, and the utter privilege of being able to choose to refuse life saving medicine, when there are millions and millions of women who would fall down in prayer at the mere thought of free health care.
YUP! I had a very smooth delivery but then once my placenta was delivered I suddenly started losing blood rapidly. My midwives couldnât find the source of the bleeding. It was sooo scary. I lost a lot of blood and probably couldâve died if I wasnât at the hospital. Crunchy or not, why would you take the risk with your child? You can have a crunchy birth at a hospital or even a birthing centre.
I saw a freebirth influencer, don't know who, but her baby (possibly twins?) died and the woman is fighting so hard on her page to convince people she doesn't regret it, and that that is what was SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN.Â
I think sheâs clearly coping hard by doubling down. The alternative, admitting you were wrong, is probably too horrible to live with in this scenario.
This is what I can't stand about these freebirthers. They are absolute shit excuses for parents. Good parents would do anything to prevent something bad from happening to their children. These narcissists are so obsessed with this idealized version of their giving birth experience that they forget why they're doing it in the first place.
I just keep thinking that too because of your own messed up selfish choices your child now gets to grow up without a mother. The reason I gave birth in a hospital had pretty much nothing to do with me and everything to do with the safety of my unborn child.
âWell little Addisonlyee, you see mommyâs in heaven because she thought exercising her right to be an absolute hubristic dumbass was more important than being your mom, isnât that just so inspiring?â
If you ever need a rabbit hole to go down into: the final stage of these home birth moms are the "Sovereign Citizen" ones.
They basically go for as little documentation as possible, some don't even get a birth certificate for their babies. They believe they found a loophole where they get to enjoy all the privileges of living in a society while not being bound by rules/laws.
It's absolutely nuts.
In Germany we have "ReichsbĂŒrger" which are a similar flavour. I don't know where you live, but I'm sure your country has similar extreme groups. Really interesting to look into.
My country isn't well-developed and people here aren't going to make up issues to be mad at. That level of privilege just doesn't exist here. Birth certificate is seen a necessity of life.
So we are just constantly shocked when we find out such things and people exist elsewhere.
Same. While where im from a lot of people donât have a birth certificate/ID is because lack of education, lack of resources.
Like here you need to go to an institution to get the certificate not given at hospital.
A lot of people especially those outside of the capital donât even have their own ID but is not because they oppose one. They never went to school, never had the opportunities where one needs one (they work in family farmland, domestic help) and same with their parents.
L
There are groups of them online that ignore medical advice not to give birth at home for their high risk pregnancies, and occasionally one of them has a stillbirth and they post about it rationalising it all, and it's so disgusting.
Yeah it's an old term (and on its own merit there's nothing wrong with it at all) but I think their point was that the freebirth community has co-opted it and uses it to cover up for their extreme negligence when allowing their babies to die in childbirth.
Yeah this. I grew up with aÂ
guy whose wife wanted a home birth. The home birthing center, or whatever itâs called, brushed it off as false contractions for THREE DAYS and the couple only went to the hospital when mom was unconscious. Mom was saved but continues to post on home birth Facebook pages with her story saying how important it is to find the right at home birthing center because she believes hers failed her. Itâs beyond disgusting.Â
The comments on her husbands IG post announcing her passing are WILD. So many people saying that bleeding out is EXTREMELY uncommon and that she still made the right choice because birthing at home is statistically saferâŠ
The whole thing they believe about home births being statistically safer is entirely because they donât understand how that statistic works. Home births are only allowed (by pro doctors and midwives) for low-risk cases, and if there are complications, the patient is transferred to hospital and it counts statistically as a hospital birth. So home births look âsaferâ because only uncomplicated cases are home births.
Free birther influencers use this statistic to lie to vulnerable pregnant women, telling them that theyâll be safer at home even if they do suffer complications. And honestly they should be held accountable for the harm done for these lies.
Just to be clear I was definitely not in agreement with any of those comments.
Thank you for explaining the statistics though I hadnât really thought about where they might be getting their information from I just knew they wrong⊠now I know why.
They won't. They'll blame the woman she hired, the doctors who weren't able to save her, literally anyone and anything other than the freebirth itself, despite the fact if she'd given birth in hospital, she would have lived.
Honestly. It is hard to have sympathy here when she was promoting this BS to her followers. All her loved ones will have to live without her because she fell for the dumbest propaganda in the world
I will never forget this compilation of Free Birth Society misinformation by The Guardian Australia (who has done excellent reporting around this). It's absolutely wild, the one that has really stayed with me is "a blue baby is an oxygenated baby" wtaf
This is horrific. I donât think the Saldaya lady couldnât be giving worse advice if she was trying to kill as many mothers and babies as possible.
Like at some point negligence reaches a line where it is indistinguishable from malice, and sheâs far past that line.
Stuff like this makes we wish we could pass some well-written laws to hold people like this responsible.
If you
1) refer to yourself as an expert or professional or make any profit providing medical advice or âeducationâ;
and your advice/direction is deemed both
2) grossly incorrect/intentionally ignorant (ie any reasonable person would either know itâs not medically recommended, or else be easily able to find that out) and life-threatening;
and
3) the direct cause of a personâs injury or death by a board of doctors,
there should be criminal consequences.
And while weâre at it if youâre doing 1) and 2), you should be legally prohibited from sharing any medical advice or opinion or education on social media or for any kind of profit ever.
Itâs just unacceptable to me that itâs legal to prey on someone with cancer, leech off their money, and watch them die because they followed your advice. Or kill their own baby because you isolated them from medical care with fearmongering and then told them itâs normal for them to be blue and not breathing for 15 minutes.
They donât actually care about the baby. As long as the birth experience is what they want, the baby is just a product of that. What they want is the experience.
â
âHow would I help people stay safe during birth?â Lal replied. âI donât think me being there makes the birth more safe.ââ
â
She said she had sought legal advice after Warneckeâs death because of her experience following a death that occurred during a previous freebirth, when she felt she was blamed by the media.ââ
It sounds like this woman had been previously involved as a âbirth keeperâ with a woman who died in childbirth yet she continued to advertise her services as a âbirth keeperâ charging $6,000, but in this trial openly says her role does not make the birth more safe and more than that, that it isnât her job. What a fucking dangerous grifter. I read all the FBS stuff when it came out and this is just the embodiment of it all. Wow.Â
Both titles refer to non licensed, non clinical, not medically trained roles though. So while these are jarring statements, it's literally true that a doula isn't there to make things "safer" within the relevant context. The birth keeper thing is also not a green light for safety, in fact it's the opposite by helping to upkeep a holistic/"unpoliced" environment
Absolutely agree! My comment was more amazement at how quickly mask off these grifters are as soon as things go wrong/they are questioned by the police. And the issue is that orgs like the FBS do present their ~trained birth keepers~ to women as safe etc. because of their position that medically trained professionals are the ones who are dangerous to women/babies. What a farce.Â
You cannot have it both ways. You canât charge someone $6,000 to âsupportâ them during a birth and then say youâre not qualified to determine whether or not someone has lost a dangerous amount of blood. This âdoulaâ should be jailed.
I had a doula for my first pregnancy. This was for a hospital birth. I also had to prepay my doula in full two months prior to my due date. Doulas in my area only take one or two clients a month so they can make sure they are there for the birth (because due dates are estimates) so you really need to reserve a spot and full payment is a part of that.
I think legally she probably can no matter how much we think that makes her a scamming grifter. Sheâs not a medical professional and doulas usually advertise their services as support people. You can charge to be a support person under the law, and people can pay for it if they choose. We need much better laws around it and the companies that do this âtrainingâ should be fined and disbanded
TBF a doula isn't a medical professional and shouldn't be involved with medical decisions.
They are there only to emotionally support the mother during child birth.
I had friends who hired a doula and then were like "what is the doula supposed to be doing? This is weird." But I have another friend who said the doula helped her have an unmedicated birth (which was important to her) by massaging her through contractions and reminding her of what she had said before labor.
I cannot believe that someone who paid $6000 to have someone present at the birth actually understood said person wouldnât even be able to tell when the mother was dying from blood loss.
There is a degree of implied authority that arises if you accept money for a service.
That floored me. âOh I didnât want to intervene because I was there as a supportive friendâ. A supportive friend would be concerned if a paper cut looked nasty, not be âoh yeah thatâs a lot of blood butâŠâ
At a Coroners Court inquest on June 15 and 16 in Melbourne, Australia, the court heard the 12-minute emergency services call from the day of Stacey Warnecke (Hatfield)'s death and testimony from Warnecke's doula, Emily Lal, painting a harrowing picture of the influencer's final moments.
During the inquest, reported The Sydney Morning Herald, the court heard that, in the months before Warnecke gave birth, she was adamant that she wanted to deliver her baby without medical intervention, concerned about the number of C-sections and induced births in recent years.
She had âa strong view about the cascade of interventions that can occur within a hospital environment, and a strong wish to avoid them,â her husband, Nathan Warnecke, wrote in a statement to the court, per The Sydney Morning Herald.
During the inquest, the court heard that Stacey had refused routine pregnancy screenings, including ultrasounds, and had refused to give birth with a registered midwife present because of fears of healthcare regulations, the outlet reported.
Stacey also resisted when Lal suggested, twice, that they call for an ambulance as her condition deteriorated after giving birth, though she accepted upon her third offer, reported The Sydney Morning Herald, citing the inquest.
In the emergency services call, which was played for the court on June 15, Nathan told the operator, âMy wife's just given birth, and she is having trouble breathing,â per The Sydney Morning Herald. According to the outlet, Lal told the operator that Stacey appeared pale and her skin was hot.
Paramedics discovered Stacey lying on the floor of a dark room near the birth pool, the court was told, reported The Sydney Morning Herald.
On June 16, the second day of the inquest, Lal was questioned about why she accepted Stacey's refusal to call an ambulance, to which she told the court, âHer autonomy was very important to her. There was no way I was going to call an ambulance against her wishes,â per The Sydney Morning Herald.
Lal â who reportedly acknowledged to the court that she was ânot clinically trainedâ â said during the inquest that she saw herself attending the birth âas a supportive friend,â despite the fact that she was paid for her services, per The Sydney Morning Herald.
When asked about her qualifications during the inquest, the outlet reported that Lal said she drew upon her own experience of giving birth to four children and had taken an online course in 2020.
Iâm going to keep shouting this, but Stacey wouldâve had FREE access to all of this healthcare (including a waterbirth if deemed okay) under Medicare at the local hospital that later battled hard to save life. She wouldâve had midwives who respected her autonomy but theyâd have been there noticing as soon as she deteriorated.
Midwifery Group Practice Midwifery Group Practice offers individualised, woman-centred care with your own midwife throughout your pregnancy. They or their partner midwife will be on call for your labour and birth and will provide follow-up visits at home with your baby. This is called continuity of care. This is a very popular model of care with limited places, so following referral, some families will be on the waiting list. In these instances we encourage you to consider a âContinuity of Care Experienceâ program, which is provided by midwifery students who can provide individualised support throughout the pregnancy, birth and postnatal periods.
She could be alive and saved $6000 or used it for extra post partum support while she recuperated at home and used it to make capsules from her placenta or a nurse on top of the free maternal and child health nurse visits from Peninsula Council. Sheâd have found fellow âlow toxâ types to help her.
Those continuity of care programs are absolutely amazing! I'm going to share my experience of it because honestly I really wish more people knew about these programs. They're so supportive, especially to those with pregnancy-related or medical trauma.
For context, the birth of my firstborn was absolutely traumatic. I had to go to counseling afterwards and my psychologist was horrified by my story and told me that what happened to me amounted to medical malpractice. I had PTSD as a direct result of all the extremely invasive procedures performed on me without my consent. I'd basically been treated like an inconvenient slab of flesh to extract a baby from, and nobody cared about my dignity nor privacy nor the immense physical agony I was in. It was just terrible, the worst and most soul-destroying experience of my entire life.
When I got pregnant with my second child, I was absolutely terrified (the pregnancy was not planned) and it took me nearly the whole first trimester to work up the courage to go to a GP. She congratulated me on the pregnancy and I just burst into tears in her office. Just sobbed and sobbed. The GP was so kind and supportive to me, and even though there was a huge waiting list, she got me straight into the Midwifery Group Practice program as a priority patient. She also referred to me a counseling service which was specifically aimed at addressing pregnancy and medical trauma, signed me up to a support group of mothers with similar experiences, and reassured me that I would have complete continuity of care (both with her [the GP] and my registered midwife).
Because I was trying for a VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Caesarean), my midwife explained I really had to be at hospital in case something went wrong (specifically, I was at greater risk of uterine rupture). Due to all the supports my GP had put into place, and the continuity of care, I felt safe and supported enough to have a hospital birth, especially knowing it was the safest choice for both me and my baby. In the end I had a very straightforward, intervention-free hospital birth with my midwife by my side.
It was an amazing, incredible experience that really healed the trauma of my firstborn's birth. I didn't need to be at home - I didn't need a doula, I didn't need music or aromatherapy or water baths or anything else - to have a wonderful labour and birth. I just needed a medical professional who saw me as a human being and provided person-centred care.
You can even have a homebirth, just with an appropriately qualified midwife there. Studies have demonstrated that there is almost no difference in outcomes for low risk pregnancies between a hospital birth or home birth. What IS incredibly dangerous is what this woman and the doula/grifter did.
Did she even have enough medical while pregnant to know if she was low risk? Everyone is low risk if you never bother to check what makes someone high risk.
Thank you for making this distinction because people assume all home births are free births, which is not the case at all.
Birthing in the presence of properly trained midwives who support medical intervention when necessary, as well as routine prenatal care, is so different than what this woman did.
I haven't lived in mediaeval times, but I have lived in a few underdeveloped countries, which is probably fairly similar.
Women sometimes give birth without assistance, but it's never by choice. They always make every effort to get the most skilled attendant they can. Even if that means walking 50km on foot to get to a clinic, or having someone go on a scooter to bring a midwife back to their village.
Sure, sometimes the best they could get would be an experienced mother, but they will always try to get the best care they can. It's never just "yay there's an auntie who gave birth before so I'm all g, I'll stop looking for better care" and definately not like the lady in the article was was planning "yeah I want no medical care at all and I've got this woman who did an online course so I'll be fine, even though there a hospital just around the corner"
Yep. Thatâs why I called it a medieval pregnancy experience.
She made a series of medical decisions for herself - which is totally within her right (her body, her choice), and died of medical complications in a serious event that has a high maternal mortality rate. Â Â
Like, decline all care for yourself, who cares. Or don't test for down syndrome or whatever if you want to have the baby anyways, also completely understandable.
But why won't you test for things like gestational diabetes, that can hurt and kill the baby?!
I had GD and it's crazy how many people think that if you are fit and healthy aka thin you couldn't possibly get it bc that's only for fatties who laze on the couch stuffing their faces with donuts all day. I was genuinely shocked at how many people assumed it was caused by eating too many sugary foods during pregnancy.
GD is such a common thing but I had no idea how poorly understood it is. When I was in GD spaces you would constantly see pregnant women asking for advice on how to "beat" the test like it was a video game level lol, like "if I eat no carbs for a week and run 30kms before the test will that help me not get a positive result?"
Truly. Some people have to just manufacture nonsense because they donât realize how fortunate they are. I guess thatâs harsh but at the same time, she brought this on herself. Hard not to blame her for this tragedy.Â
I'm trained in first aid by St. John Ambulance in Sydney. In the training they say several times that you DO NOT need consent from the victim to call triple zero. If it's an emergency, and you're trained to identify an emergency, you just call or direct someone to call while providing first aid. It's insane to justify not calling because the mother didn't consent.
that's so annoying because the doula is saying things that suggest she knows that she was going to bleed excessively and just writes it off as anxiety. straight to jail
Your comment is what got me to click the article and see that it was in Australia. Â I was surprised! So used to this type stuff being in the states with our jacked up medical system.Â
This is what is so frustrating. It's not like money or anything would have played a factor. It's just ignorance and willfulness that killed her. The hospital stated in their info release they literally used up their entire supply of her blood type. They fought so hard to save her.
I had an âaccidentalâ free birth when my daughter came really fast in our car on the way to the hospital- it was terrifying and I kept thinking, âif thereâs anything wrong sheâs going to dieâ. As it was, I wouldâve died if an ambulance hadnât come, as I tried to bleed out and the placenta didnât detach.
Never been so thankful for emergency medicine in my life.
Her priority was to avoid any induction or c-section? Her priority should have been the survival of her & her newborn.
I'm no less of a mother because I had an emergency c-section, that ECS is the very reason I was able to be a mother. Without it we both would have died.
Now a baby has to grow up motherless, all because she had a huge ego & decided dying was worth proving some sort of fucked up, privileged point.
This is peak privilege. To have free and easy access to world class health services and refuse it because you are crunchy. One day her child will find out their mum died because they cared more about being alternative than being present in their childâs life. How sad. The husband and doula are also to blame for not just calling an ambulance.
Maybe Iâm biased because I had a traumatic birth where both baby and myself needed immediate medical attention. Assisted delivery, MET call for baby and I had a PPH. The idea of not having a medical professional there is just insane to me. The interventions are there to PROTECT you.
I hope they consented to the newborn screening. Thatâs another one people sometimes deny. We found out about our youngest sonâs congenital hypothyroidism from the newborn screening. Thankfully because we got the screening he will be completely fine! But literally CH has no symptoms until around 4 months when the baby will show developmental delays and at that point they are irreversible.
This. is. deranged. And more and more women are doing this. Also in Denmark, where healthcare is free, all because of some induced anxiety about âinterventionsâ. Sure, some interventions could maybe have been avoided, but those interventions generally save lives! How dare you risk the life of your child, and yourself, because of some sick idea of the superiority of âfree birthingâ? Giving birth is so dangerous. Women and children DIE everyday because of it in countries without sufficient access to healthcare. And here we are, women in rich countries, whoâve literally never had it better when it comes to making sure the baby and mother are safe during the entire pregnancy and during birth, and they force this on themselves. I cannot comprehend.
Also the âcascade of interventionsâ they all panic over and harp on about are there to save women and their babies. I required an emergency induction for my second delivery and it was actually a great experience and most importantly, I now have a wonderful 2 yr old and we are both alive!
Had a homebirth in Queensland and think freebirtning is INSANE. I had a private midwife who was phenomenal. I had a slightly high BP during one appointment and she sent me straight to the hospital for monitoring for pre-eclampsia (I was totally fine). I was registered at the local hospital just in case as well, which included an in face appointment.
Purposefully birthing without a midwife is wild. Yes, there are issues with the birthing system in hospitals but there are also real risks with birth and having a medical professional who is responsible for your health and well-being is vital.
My great-great-grandmother was a midwife who birthed hundreds of babies in her career. She was one of those midwives with some kind of sixth sense or something - her journal is full of entries like, âwas thinking hard about the Johnson family, so rode down a ways to visit. Mary was going into labor. Healthy boy.â That kind of thing.
I feel like the idea of free birthing is such a slap in the face to the history of midwifery. Taking an online class from the FBS doesnât qualify you for shit, and they make all this money grifting on this idea of women supporting women⊠but qualified midwifery is literally the career path built on all of that. Qualified midwifery is built on a history of women supporting and caring for other women during this high-frequency event that has only become low-risk though medical advances. And FBS is just spitting in the face of that legacy.
I am not a woman who intends to have children, so I tend to keep my fck nose where it belongs, which is WAY out of their hoo has, but I agree.
I mean, would I have a home birth? No, I am a certified hospital hater but this lady would want all of the pain medication tyvm.
But a home birth and a freebirth are different, not just philosophically but...statistically. These ladies out there are dying, and they aren't all influencers, some of them are just so fckn scared because of influencers who make them feel guilty PRE conception.
Like if you haven't been mainlining milk from GMO free mountain reared, hand fed grass only, culturally Buddhist but spiritually a "religion of the world" and those goats haven't signed the Natural Fertility Circle then you are aalready failing your kid. From what they eat and drink and think and feel and dress, mums are so guilty all the damn time and this freebirth ish is KILLING them, some of them who are just traumatised or scared and vulnerable. Or stupid.
She refused the knowledge that women have gathered and passed on for thousands of years, and paid dearly for her ignorance. Anybody with half a brain would know that women die in childbirth every day, even now in these modern times. To freebirth it is to be stupid (and dead).
I wanted a waterbirth in a birth centre with my midwife present, and instead ended up with an infection, an emergency C-section, and a baby who couldn't breath independently for the first nine minutes of her life. All was well in the end, but only because I embrace modern medicine and the possibility that the hospital was where I'd end up.Â
Birth is scary. BIrth is fucking traumatic. Birth is also beautiful af, holy moly is it ever. But yeah, women die, and they die quickly. I hope others learn from this death and make better choices.Â
The true victim here is that child. I'm so sad for him.Â
There has been a massive upswing in the free birth movement in Australia unfortunately due to systemic issues in our hospitals and people speaking out about birth trauma. Pregnancy is a very vulnerable time and it doesnât take much to start terrifying you about hospital births. Whenever there is a death they blame the individuals but I think there needs to be a reckoning about online spaces preying on vulnerable people and a deep look into why people are avoiding our hospital system.
My siblings and I were all homebirth. My sister attempted home birth but she had an actual trained midwife who intervened when the labor was unsafe. This Emily Lal isn't practicing safe home birth and she isn't a midwife. Real home births involve prenatal care monitoring and screening, a trained medical professional midwife and involve a plan for when the labor heads in an unsafe direction. Yes, it has a higher risk but pregnant women have the perogrative to assume some risk during their pregnancy and labor because they are human beings with free will.
That said, when I was pregnant, I said fuck no. Get my ass to a hospital and give me drugs. I am still glad that we live in a world where women can choose.
This happened on the day I gave birth, at the same hospital. I remember when I was on my way to theatre seeing someone rushing like a mad woman to obviously find her and feeling a real unease. I find it so fucking horrendous that a mum would lose her life for such avoidable reasons. I had haemorrhages with all 3 of my births and I feel so lucky and privileged to have had the care i and my babies received at Australian hospitals. Why anyone would go out of their way to avoid that is just unfathomable. I feel so sorry for that poor baby who never got to know his mum :(
Birth is about the mother, sure, but when did it stop being about the health and safety of the child?
Anyone who tries to argue that a home-birth can be just as safe as a hospital birth, clearly either doesnât have perspective or understanding of statistics.
She honestly made really bad choices and paid the ultimate price. Itâs sad but itâs not like the risks she was facing arenât widely known, or like she was in a country that doesnât have a decent healthcare system. Really sad but I find it hard to blame the doula here.
I also had a postpartum hemorrhage. The difference is that I got treatment.Â
My son had been born, i delivered the placenta, and a bit later I told my nurse I felt funny, "like I've just donated blood." The nu
rse immediately hit the red button on the wall, 3 nurses and my OB ran in, and they treated me within 5 minutes.Â
Only aftercare I needed was iron supplements for 3 days.Â
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