How safe are water births?
It is safe for you and your baby to labour in water if you are healthy and your pregnancy is going well. Labouring in water means using a birth pool or bath during the first stage of labour, which is while you are having contractions. This is before the stage when you push your baby out. There is no difference between the health of babies born to women who laboured in water, and those who laboured out of water. Less is known about the safety of actually giving birth in water. The professional bodies that represent midwives and doctors will not say yet whether it’s safe for mothers to give birth in water. The Royal College of Midwives and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists want more research to be done before they can give that pledge. However, the studies we have so far show that the health of babies born in water and those born in air are similar. The studies looked at Apgar scores, which are a way of measuring babies’ health at birth. They also looked at how many b
