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An inquest into the death of Stacey Warnecke heard she twice refused an ambulance
An inquest into the death of influencer Stacey Warnecke has heard that she twice refused an ambulance after she started bleeding following a home birth.
The Australian influencer died on 29 September last year, with a medical examiner proposing that her cause of death was ‘postpartum haemorrhage in the setting of a home birth’.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the woman had given birth to her son Axel at home, with her husband Nathan and Emily Lal, a doula, which is a non-medical individual there to provide support.
She had chosen a freebirth which means the mother gives birth at home without trained medical professionals.
The inquest heard that Warnecke started bleeding heavily after delivering the placenta and started gasping for air, and that she only agreed to have an ambulance called the third time she was asked after she’d said no the first two times.
Stacey Warnecke died last year following complications from a freebirth, she was rushed to hospital but did not survive (GoFundMe)
When paramedics arrived they found the 30-year-old woman lying on the floor with cold skin and took her to Frankston Hospital, when she was moved from the stretcher in the ambulance to a hospital bed there was a ‘big gush of blood’.
Hospital staff performed an emergency hysterectomy on Warnecke in an attempt to stop the bleeding, and the hospital’s supply of her blood type was exhausted from efforts to save her life, but she suffered multiple cardiac arrests and died.
The inquest was told that hospital staff made ‘heroic efforts’ to save the woman’s life.
In a statement provided to the inquest her husband Nathan said his late wife had ‘a strong view about the cascade of interventions that can occur within a hospital environment, and a strong wish to avoid them’.
Warnecke, who promoted a ‘chemical free’ lifestyle in her influencer work, had chosen to have a freebirth as she felt it was the only way to have a baby entirely on her own terms, the inquest heard.