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.