Article: Breaking Water Does Not Speed Delivery

[alioops]

Having my waters broken saved me from emergency C/S! I was 5 cm dilated and exhaused in labour with Em. the MW checked me when i was asking for an epi (told u i was exhausted!) and broke my waters to see if that would help. My waters were menconum stained and within 5 minutes of my waters being broken, Em was out. so 5cm to born in 5 minutes. and just missed out on emergency C/S as Em was distressed. She took a bit of work to get breathing properly. With Sarah I was pushing and the waters were bulging out, and they feel strange! so they were broken so that her head could descend to where the water was blocking her. She too was in distress, with menconium staining but was fine. I dont know whether my third will have waters broken or not but we will cross that bridge when we come to it. I hope that they can be left intact, but it depends on the colour of the waters.

[BekZ]

I went into labour at 1am in the morning. I turned up at the hospital at 2.30am to be told that I was 6 cm dialated and my waters where "bulging". To this point I was managin my labour extremely well and felt that all was progressing fine. The midwife told me that she would like my baby to be born soon because she was changing shifts. She offered to "speed" up the birth by breaking my waters!! She broke my waters and manually stretched my cervix .Within 3 mins my pain became unmanagable and the urge to push was impossible to ignore. Loren was born 10 mins later. I lost control of the birth, I tore really badly, bub feel on the bed and I ended up with a retained placenta and in surgery straight after birth. O

I don't know if breaking my waters contributed to all the above, but I think I would have had a better experience if all was left to progress naturally.

[Tobily]

I went into labour at 1am in the morning. I turned up at the hospital at 2.30am to be told that I was 6 cm dialated and my waters where "bulging". To this point I was managin my labour extremely well and felt that all was progressing fine. The midwife told me that she would like my baby to be born soon because she was changing shifts. She offered to "speed" up the birth by breaking my waters!! She broke my waters and manually stretched my cervix .Within 3 mins my pain became unmanagable and the urge to push was impossible to ignore. Loren was born 10 mins later. I lost control of the birth, I tore really badly, bub feel on the bed and I ended up with a retained placenta and in surgery straight after birth. O

I don't know if breaking my waters contributed to all the above, but I think I would have had a better experience if all was left to progress naturally.

Bekz thanks for sharing that. I think your story shows another side to this question that's often not explored. I've been at a birth where a similar thing happened - mum agreed to her water being broken because she'd been up at the hospital all night with hindwater leak and nothing was happening - and everything went from nice and manageable to full on in 10 minutes flat. I literally saw her go from coping beautifully to screaming her head off because her baby just fell down on her cervix and she didn't have time to catch up. It was so much harder than it needed to be.

I think the fundamental question is really WHY do we think it's beneficial to speed labour up. Who does it benefit when a baby and a mother are doing well, and they're happy to just coast along on their own timetable. Just another symptom of the way society is I guess...why wait around for something when we don't have to.

[paradise lost]

That's why i think it's important that an experienced midwife who knows the woman needs to be making this sort of suggestion and not one who is "changing shift" and wants the birth over with. If the MUM is exhausted and wants things speeding up and the midwife agrees that her labour is one which is likely to benefit then and only then should AROM be considered. Doing it because you can is plain stupid.

My labour had no "padding" of waters and was not especially painful until i was instructed not to push. Even then, it wasn't so much more pain as the same pain (mild chinese-burning feeling at the cervix, no other pain) heightened with mild panic because it was so hard not to push when she was through the cervix already. Not every woman feels labour as more painful once the waters break, not every labour with accelerate dramatically. I have a friend who had AROM and felt much better for it (the pain over her bump during ctx lessened) but her labour then stalled and her ctx vanished for 40mins.

"First do no harm" - that means that the chance of benefit to the MOTHER and the BABY needs to be strong before ANY intervention is considered. Sadly many practitioners consider AROM a non-issue as interventions go because there are no drugs involved. I know of many women who had it done without even being consulted. Really there is nothing special or different about the female body in labour that warrants any treatment you wouldn't have given her in the 22nd week of pregnancy. Even if no professional ever LOOKS at the vagina (inside or out) the baby will still emerge from it in his or her own sweet time.

[Cricket]

I truly do think that when you are in well-established labour, the water breaking will speed things up. With my first DD, my waters broke at home after about 2 hours of contractions. She was born 4.5 hours later. (not too bad for a first baby!) With my second, I laboured for 6 hours before my ob offered to break my water, if I wanted. I said sure! DD2 was born about 45 minutes later. With my third, I laboured for about 10 hours without "progressing" (stuck at 4cm). At about 6pm (I think!) my midwife agreed to break my water (I asked), and things became MUCH more intense from that point on. DD3 was born about 1.5 hours later.
In my experience, it definitely speeds things up. Whether it's a good idea or not is an entirely different question.

[Kitt3n]

My dd was just about to pop, and my waters still had not broken. The MW took care of this, and DD was born about 5 minutes later.

15 hour labour.

I have no idea if it would have sped anythign up, but i do know that having it ruptered just before she said hello to the world made the process very wet and slimy - there was absolutely no pain when she came out, just felt like a big blob of jelly!