A nutritionist who bled to death after giving birth at home was allegedly “groomed” to resist medical intervention and conditioned to view hospital transfers as a form of “self-sabotage” or “personal failure”, an inquest has been told after crucial new evidence came to light.
The Victorian Coroners Court was told by counsel assisting the Victorian Coroner, Rachel Ellyard, on Monday that recently discovered evidence on Stacey Warnecke’s phone, including a recorded conversation with free birth advocate Emily Lal, should see the doula referred to the Office of Public Prosecutions and face potential criminal charges for previously lying to the court.
While Warnecke was already drawn to free birth ideology when she contacted Lal, the 30-year-old and her husband Nathan were never adequately warned of the deadly risks home birth posed, Ellyard said on Monday.
In the audio recording played during the final hearing into Warnecke’s death, the first-time mother told Lal that while her husband supported her wishes, he had expressed anxiety about her desire for a home birth and the potential risks.
“My husband has learnt to like, really hold me in my vulnerable moments and to not buy into my drama and to be the energy that I need when I’m unravelling,” Lal said of her own births.
During the 30-minute-long conversation, Lal could be heard telling Warnecke that a long, painful labour was a personal transformation journey for the mother, describing it as “the death of the maiden” and “birth of the woman”.
In the same recording, Lal said that when labour reached its peak intensity, women often pleaded to go to hospital, in what she described as unconscious “self-sabotage”.
“You will get to a point in your labour where you’re like, actually, I’m dying,” Lal said, adding that Warnecke’s mindset of not wanting to be in hospital needed to “be really strong”.
“Once we’ve spent the next six months really unpacking physiology and how birth works and what we do to support it, and you really being strong in your own mindset, you will be prepared to do it on your own,” Lal told Warnecke.
Lal also said some of her clients had been in labour for up to five days.
“Your Honour might take the view that Ms Lal saw her role as to groom her clients into being strong enough to resist the temptation to seek medical help during labour, to seek pain relief during labor, to go to hospital during labor,” Ellyard told the court.
“It’s clear that Ms Lal thought that in most cases going to hospital would represent a failure of someone who hadn’t done the work, who hadn’t understood enough what the intensity of labour was going to be.”
Ellyard said Lal’s interaction with Warnecke during the conversation “sharply contradicted” the doula’s previous evidence, when earlier this year she described her services to the court as a “supportive friend or big sister” who charged $6000 for her time and travel and did not provide medical advice.
“The recording that we’ve just heard is a contemporaneous account of Ms Lal speaking to a potential client,” Ellyard said.
“She speaks of a pattern of practice in relation to her clients. This is all quite inconsistent with the idea of just being a friend who pulls your hair back and wipes your forehead,” she said.
Addressing Coroner Therese McCarthy, Ellyard said, “Having regard to the materials that have now become available, not least Ms Lal’s own voice on the recording ... it would be open to your honour to form the view that Ms Lal wasn’t truthful in the evidence that she gave to you, and that a referral could be made [to the Office of Public Prosecutions] in relation to the offence of perjury.”
Warnecke died in hospital on September 29, 2025, after giving birth to her son at her home in Melbourne’s south-east. Only Warnecke, Nathan and Lal were present at the home birth.
Almost immediately after passing her placenta, Warnecke began to haemorrhage, but twice refused having an ambulance called. She agreed when asked a third time and was rushed to Frankston Hospital, where staff exhausted their blood supply trying to save her life. Her son, Axel, survived the birth.
The inquest heard on Monday that Warnecke’s decision to give birth at home without qualified medical staff present left her 300 times more likely to die than if she had been in a hospital setting, and that had a trained midwife or medical staff been present she would have survived.
During the phone conversation, Warnecke told Lal she had a deep and intense fear of hospitals and conventional obstetrics.
”You should be scared of the hospital,” Lal responded. “It’s a terrifying place.”
Warnecke admitted to Lal that she had fallen so far down an online free-birth “rabbit hole” that she now viewed women who voluntarily chose to give birth in hospitals as the ones who were “crazy”.
The court also heard that Lal operated two WhatsApp groups within the free birth community that Warnecke was a member of.
The group chats often described dangerously prolonged and excruciating labours, which were “spiritualised” as sacred rites of passage that “touched the veil between life and death”, the court heard.
They also discussed several catastrophic outcomes from “wild births”, including the death of one baby, details of another baby who suffered a severe hypoxic brain injury following a prolonged free birth, and discussions surrounding a coronial finding into the death of a baby whose mother had hired a birthing pool from Lal.
When severe physical trauma occurred during free births Lal oversaw, the court heard she used a network of unregistered midwives to carry out medical care, including attending one woman’s home to suture a perineal tear after birth.
Lal told the court in June that she had replaced her mobile phone in the days after Warnecke’s death and as a result, no longer had any correspondence between herself and the 30-year-old.
She also previously testified that she stopped attending births out of grief following Warnecke’s death; however, WhatsApp messages presented to the court on Monday showed she had contacted one of the groups from a new number on October 14 to say she would continue to attend births.
“I’m only going to be accepting referrals by word of mouth and only attending very limited numbers of births. So, if you know anyone you think would be a good fit, please let me know,” she wrote.
Lal previously said she did not believe it was her obligation to call an ambulance as Warnecke lay dying in her home last year, and said she did not see it as her role to make the birth safer.
She said she initially believed Warnecke was having a panic attack when she began struggling to breathe, and told the court that “there was no way I was going to call an ambulance against her wishes”.
“Her autonomy was very important to her,” she told the inquest, later adding, “I am not clinically trained … it is not my role to assess blood loss.”
The inquest continues.