Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email<\/a><\/p>\nWhen intensive care paramedics arrived at 4.36am, Warnecke\u2019s blood pressure was undetectable and they had to try to stabilise her enough following what they recognised as a massive postpartum haemorrhage to transport her to Frankston hospital for emergency care.<\/p>\n
When she arrived at the hospital at about 5.13am, she expelled a \u201cbig gush of blood\u201d while staff transferred her from the trolley to a bed, Ellyard said.<\/p>\n
By 5.15am, she was in cardiac arrest.<\/p>\n
Ellyard described the \u201cheroic\u201d efforts of hospital staff as they tried to manage multiple cardiac arrests and ongoing bleeding that specialists decided would require surgery, including a hysterectomy and a procedure to drain fluid from her heart.<\/p>\n
The coroner heard it was challenging to stabilise Warnecke enough for surgery and her care required use of the entire blood supply at the hospital, with reinforcement supply called in. Staff were also challenged by the impact of ongoing CPR on her heart.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cMoney changed hands\u201d when Lal became Warnecke\u2019s birthkeeper, Ellyard told the coroner.<\/p>\n
After surgery, Warnecke suffered from a further cardiac arrest and died shortly after 11am.<\/p>\n
\u201cMs Lal left the hospital and went back to the house to clean up,\u201d Ellyard said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt 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\u2019s death that might have required the scene to be left undisturbed.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
One clinician who treated Warnecke at Frankston hospital described in her statement how the only women she cared for who died from obstetric haemorrhage \u201cwere in the third world\u201d, Ellyard said.<\/p>\n
The forensic pathologist who conducted Warnecke\u2019s autopsy, Dr Michael Burke, told the coroner that he specifically listed the cause of death as postpartum haemorrhage \u201cin the setting of a freebirth\u201d because it is \u201crare\u201d for women to die from this when they give birth in a medical facility.<\/p>\n
\u201cA woman who dies from blood loss \u2026 it is eminently treatable if it\u2019s recognised quickly and managed,\u201d he said during his evidence on Monday.<\/p>\n
Ellyard said while Warnecke was \u201cher own person making her own choices\u201d, the function of a coronial inquest is to understand if changes can be made to protect public health and prevent future deaths.<\/p>\n
Her choice to give birth outside the health system \u201cwas not a unique one\u201d and there are a \u201cgrowing number of women making the choice to forgo traditional medical care to give birth \u2026 assisted with knowledge largely acquired online,\u201d Ellyard said.<\/p>\n
Ellyard said it is hard to know how many women choose unassisted freebirth because if those births go well, they don\u2019t come to the attention of medical professionals.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the number of medical cases that come to the attention of medical services is increasing, with very serious and tragic outcomes,\u201d Ellyard said.<\/p>\n
It was placing a \u201csignificant burden on medical services when called to respond to emergencies\u201d, Ellyard said, and in Warnecke\u2019s case her lack of contact with the medical system meant information about any pre-existing conditions to help guide care was nonexistent.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s birth.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Ellyard told the coroner that Warnecke and her husband were both concerned by vaccine mandates during the Covid-19 pandemic, and \u201cher research led her to decide she wasn\u2019t comfortable with ultrasounds, or testing for gestational diabetes\u201d.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Melbourne wellness influencer was found lying on the floor of her home in an altered state of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":339995,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-738984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=738984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/339995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=738984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=738984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=738984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}