On Water Birth

Being immersed in a warm pool of water during labor and/or birth is a wonderful way to provide non-pharmaceutical pain relief and give ease of movement and comfort. I used water in both of my labors and delivered one baby in the tub.

Water birth is perfectly safe so long as some basic principles are followed:

• Filters and water supplies are clean;
• Do not keep the baby under the water after delivery;
• Do not re-immerse the baby after the birth;
• Do not pull on the umbilical cord to raise the baby up, especially if the cord is short;
• The baby will sometimes try to take a breath if the umbilical cord is exposed to the air;
• Babies in distress (heart tones or presence of meconium) should be delivered on land.

You might ask how I can reconcile this stance with my personal experience, where my second baby was born underwater not breathing. Let me be specific about what happened:

My labor was very quick. I got in the water at 6 cm and was pushing an hour later. My water broke at 9 cm and it was clear. Fetal heart tones were monitored periodically and were perfect throughout labor. I never got the rest-and-be-thankful part of pushing; I was thrown from transition into pushing with no break and no difference in how the contractions felt. I was not aware of when the baby was born; she came quickly and with only a few pushes, with no head-molding. She was taken from me right away when she did not breathe on her own. The only indication of something being wrong was what I experienced, what I now think was a fetal ejection reflex. She was born so quickly that I think somewhere I knew something was wrong, and got her out fast. Her condition had nothing to do with her being born in the water; if anything, being in the tub helped me deliver her more quickly and got her into the hands of professionals much faster than would probably have happened otherwise. The water helped me to relax, and I loved being able to move around easily during labor, as I could in the tub.

I frankly do not understand the prohibition against water birth in US hospitals and wish they were more commonplace. At least allowing women to labor in the tub should not be an issue, but there is a lot of resistance to it. Safety issues are simply not issues with some common-sense precautions.