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.
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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]