‘There’s no longer a heartbeat’: the couple whose twins were stillborn – and the ‘birth keeper’ they blame

Ernesta Chirwa recalls the jarring moment the woman she presumed was her midwife said something unexpected. Caitlyn Collins was driving her to hospital after 6am, on 15 February 2022. “She said,” says Chirwa, who is 30 and lives in Cape Town, “Please don’t mention to the nurses that we were trying to have a home birth.”

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Chirwa was in too much pain to speak – she was in active labour. But she remembers feeling surprised. “Why,” Chirwa recalls, “is she asking us not to mention that we were trying to have a home birth?”

This was the first pregnancy for Chirwa and her husband, Chifundo Bingala. Both are originally from Malawi, but moved to Cape Town, South Africa, for work: Chirwa found employment as a cleaner, and Bingala as a tailor. The couple met Collins through one of Bingala’s friends, a local shopkeeper who had seen her deliver a friend’s baby in a home birth, and vouched for her. The couple say they couldn’t afford Collins’s fee but she agreed to an exchange of clothing, made by Bingala, for her services.

When Chirwa went past her due date, to 43 weeks, Collins told the couple via text that such a late-term birth “can be normal”. When Chirwa went into labour, Collins arrived at her house after midnight, turned off the lights and fell asleep. At about 2am, Chirwa and Bingala roused Collins, who briefly checked her before going back to sleep. Around 5am, they woke Collins up a second time. She checked Chirwa again, and saw a baby’s foot protruding from her vagina.

Now, in a silence punctuated only by Chirwa’s groans, Collins drove the couple to Retreat Day hospital. It was the closest hospital to their house, in the township of Westlake. But it specialised in low-risk care and wasn’t suited for more serious emergencies. And Chirwa was very much a serious emergency. Her baby was footling breech – one of the most difficult types of breech to deliver – with a prolapsed cord. And though Chirwa didn’t yet know it, she was carrying twins.

View image in fullscreen Caitlyn Collins’s testimonial for the Radical Birth Keeper school. Photograph: YouTube/Free Birth Society

Chirwa and Bingala recall that Collins initially tried to drop Chirwa off at the gate. Bingala intervened and demanded Collins drive them to the front entrance. Chirwa, he pointed out, couldn’t walk. Collins pulled up by the entrance and dropped them off.