Concerns over the danger of babies in freebirth movement

ABC NEWS (Australia)

An ABC investigation has found 10 catastrophic incidents linked to women in southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales giving birth at home without a midwife. Seven babies have died, including twins born this month near Mullumbimby.

Transcript

00:00 This investigation started off the back of the ABC's Birth Project, which was an audience

00:06 call out asking for women's experiences of birth.

00:09 A very small number of women wrote in about pre-birth.

00:13 So that's when a woman chooses to birth without a medical professional.

00:18 Women had spoken about the various reasons that they were choosing this, and that's what

00:22 the initial story was going to be about, why women were choosing pre-birth.

00:26 Some said they couldn't access a home birth, or they couldn't afford it.

00:30 Others said that they just wanted an undisturbed birth.

00:33 But as we got to look into it a little bit more, we began to discover there was this

00:38 quite radical element to this movement as well.

00:43 And we dug into the world of the support workers who are attending these births with women

00:48 who want free birth.

00:49 So they don't generally have medical training, and they call themselves free birth doolers

00:54 or birth keepers.

00:57 And their whole idea is about leaving a woman to birth undisturbed without medical intervention.

01:03 But what we were discovering was that in parts of Queensland and northern New South Wales,

01:09 although these women had minimal training, they were in high demand, and women were paying

01:14 thousands of dollars to have these women attend their birth.

01:18 But there were a spate of incidents that we uncovered where these women had attended births

01:24 that had gone pretty pear-shaped.

01:28 And there was concerns about their ability to navigate an emergency.

01:32 And that's when we uncovered a number of baby deaths, brain injuries, and there was this

01:40 mother's death that had already been made public that was linked to a free birth as

01:44 well.

01:45 This has been not an easy story to navigate.

01:48 It's emotionally charged.

01:51 Both sides of the debate have very strong opinions about it, but there is a sense from

01:56 a lot of people, I think, that it's time for quite an honest conversation about some of

02:00 these negative outcomes that are occurring, and to have some transparency around the possibilities

02:06 for things to go wrong.

02:07 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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