A so-called “birth keeper” who charged a pregnant woman $6,000 before she died during childbirth should face potential criminal charges over her death, a coroner has been told.
The Melbourne inquest heard Emily Lal viewed her role as helping to “strengthen and fortify” women’s determination to give birth at home rather than in hospital, regardless of how difficult labour became.
Wellness influencer Stacey Warnecke, 30, died in hospital on September 29, 2025, after suffering complications from a postpartum haemorrhage. She had given birth to her son, Axel, at home several hours earlier without medical assistance.
A phone conversation between Ms Warnecke and Lal was played to the Coroners Court of Victoria on Monday. During the call, the expectant mother described how she wanted Lal to support and reassure her during childbirth.
“I envision having like that wise woman – I look at you in the eyes and like, ‘Am I okay?’” Ms Warnecke told Lal during the 30-minute conversation on January 31, 2025.
“And you’re like, ‘Yeah, you’re good, you’re good.’ Like, ‘Am I dying or am I right?’”
Ms Warnecke said she did not want tests and hoped to “cruise along”, planning a home birth with the support of her husband, Nathan, and, she hoped, Lal.
At the time, Ms Warnecke was seven weeks pregnant with her first child and told Lal she was “petrified to go to a hospital”.
Unlike midwives, whose profession is regulated, “birth keepers” do not have clinical training.
Stacey Warnecke, 30, died in hospital on September 29, 2025, after complications from a postpartum haemorrhage, several hours after giving birth to her son Axel at home without medical assistance
Rachel Ellyard, counsel assisting the coroner, said the recording “sharply contradicted” evidence Lal had given during an earlier hearing.
Lal appeared before the inquest in June after receiving a certificate protecting her from self-incrimination, on the condition that she gave truthful evidence.
On Monday, Ms Ellyard asked Coroner Therese McCarthy to refer Lal to the Director of Public Prosecutions over possible perjury and other offences.
In Victoria, a conviction for perjury carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.
Ms Ellyard urged the coroner to consider that “Ms Lal wasn’t truthful in the evidence that she gave to you”.
She said Lal may also have committed other offences “in connection with the advice she purported to give and the services that she purported to offer to Stacey and other women”.
“She was not a member of any regulated health profession and not authorised to engage in any form of medical education or support,” Ms Ellyard said.
“But was, on one view of the evidence, holding herself out as someone capable of giving such expert advice and capable of meeting the needs of pregnant women in a range of circumstances.”
The court heard Lal had been asked to return to the inquest to answer further questions, but refused to do so.
So-called “birth keeper” Emily Lal was accused by counsel assisting of “grooming” Ms Warnecke to avoid hospitals. She has refused to engage further with the coronial inquest
Ms Ellyard urged the coroner to ‘prefer’ the evidence of the recording as a ‘contemporaneous account’ over what Lal told the inquest in person.
Lal had told the inquest she was a supportive friend rather than a source of medical guidance.
Ms Ellyard said the recording showed otherwise, with Lal providing specific guidance, including about medical matters.
The inquest heard Lal saw one of her underlying roles as to ‘strengthen and fortify a woman’s reason for birthing at home, so that she wouldn’t change her mind, however tough things got’.
‘I use these words advisedly,’ Ms Ellyard said.
‘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 labour, to go to hospital during labour.’
Ms Ellyard said the recording showed Lal regarded a hospital transfer as ‘a failure of someone who hadn’t done the work’, and that Lal claimed she could tell a woman who was properly worried about her baby from one who was ‘just having a hard time’.
She also said Lal had offered to train a woman’s partner to resist the urge to help her.
‘She wasn’t offering to be Stacey’s friend,’ Ms Ellyard said. ‘She wasn’t offering just to be a comforting presence.’
Stacey Warnecke and her husband Nathan
Ms Ellyard said the coroner could conclude that Lal was ‘seeking to groom Stacey in that conversation’.
She told the court Ms Warnecke had followed Lal on Instagram for two years and already had a very clear view that freebirth – an intentional choice to give birth without medical intervention – was right for her.
The conversation, she said, ‘wasn’t a balanced conversation about the pros and cons of different approaches’.
In the recording, Lal quoted $6,000 for a package covering antenatal sessions, birth support and six weeks of postpartum care.
But she told Ms Warnecke she might not even make it to the birth.
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‘I’ll prepare the two of you to birth on your own,’ she said, adding that she did her best to be there but births sometimes happened faster than expected.
She also told her about a client whose labour lasted five days and said: ‘I’m not going to be there for five.’
Ms Ellyard said Ms Warnecke and another woman in Lal’s circle had discussed paying for her services and their disappointment when she was not available.
Emily Lal (centre) leaves the inquest into the death of Stacey Warnecke at the Melbourne Coroners Court in June
‘They weren’t paying $6,000 to Ms Lal just so that she would be their friend,’ she said.
Ms Ellyard said messages recovered from Ms Warnecke’s phone also conflicted with Lal’s evidence.
Lal had previously told the inquest she stopped working as a birth keeper after Ms Warnecke’s death.
But on October 14, 2025, Lal told her WhatsApp groups she had deactivated her Instagram because ‘there are some things going on’, would take referrals only by word of mouth and attend ‘very limited numbers of births’.
The post appeared as the Health Complaints Commissioner was publicly acting against her, including by issuing an interim prohibition order.
Ms Ellyard said that within days of media coverage about another case involving her in the death of a baby in August 2025, Lal had told the groups her phone had been hacked and she needed a new number.
Lal had told the inquest she had lost it or had it stolen.
Ms Ellyard said the groups showed Lal acted as the ‘resident expert’, giving advice and referrals, selling supplements and excluding at least one member who criticised her.
Stacey Warnecke trusted Lal, who counsel assisting said had sought to ‘groom’ her to avoid hospitals
‘This is all quite inconsistent with the idea of just being a friend who pulls your hair back and wipes your forehead,’ she said.
‘It’s something much more structured, much more deliberate.’
The inquest heard a pathologist found Ms Warnecke’s cause of death was postpartum haemorrhage ‘in the setting of a free birth’.
The inquest heard Ms Warnecke bled until her heart failed, with her uterus so exhausted through prolonged labour that it could not contract after the birth to stop the bleeding.
‘She did not die of a rare embolism. She did not die of anything unforeseen,’ Ms Ellyard said.
‘She died of a postpartum haemorrhage.’
She said Ms Warnecke had a long first stage and a prolonged second stage of labour, which raised the risk of haemorrhage – the most common complication of childbirth.
The inquest heard that while clinicians in hospital anticipate it, at home there was no one with the means to stop it.
Nathan and baby Axel, who survived the birth that claimed his mother’s life
Stacey Warnecke and her husband Nathan were expecting their first child in September last year when they underwent a ‘freebirth’ with Emily Lal that ended with Stacey dying from blood loss and her baby son Axel being left motherless
Ms Ellyard said Ms Warnecke would not have died had she had access to even a midwife.
‘Women like Stacey, who are otherwise healthy, do not die in hospital of childbirth. They don’t,’ she said.
She told the court the maternal death rate in high-income countries was three in 100,000, compared with 900 in 100,000 among women who refuse care.
‘300 times more likely to die in childbirth if you are in a country like South Sudan, or if you are a woman in a high-income country who makes the choice to not accept medical care,’ Ms Ellyard said.
‘Whether she knew it or not, and indeed, in my submission, your honour could find that she didn’t know, Stacey was exposing herself to a risk of dying in childbirth 300 times more than if she had chosen a form of birth that gave her access to medical care.
‘It’s really not clear at all that anyone ever explained that to Stacey … the difference between life and death.’
Ms Ellyard said the most distressing feature of the case was how little would have been needed to save Ms Warnecke.
Just the presence of a midwife ‘would have made the difference between life and death,’ she said.
‘If the only thing that was different was when the haemorrhage happened, the midwife gave her an injection of the relevant medication and gave her a manual massage to help the fundus contract,’ she said.
Ms Ellyard said that even if Ms Warnecke’s wish to give birth at her own pace and without intervention ‘had been respected exactly as it was’, the presence of a midwife who could respond would have saved her.
Coroner McCarthy will hand down her findings at a date to be fixed.