5) What are the pros of labouring in water?

Relaxation

The relaxing effect of water, with its support and warmth, can help you through your labour. Your contractions may lose their rhythm if you become tense. This means your labour may stop and start without moving on. Being bathed in water is likely to help you go with your contractions, so that they are less stressful for you and your baby.

Being relaxed also helps you to breathe calmly. It means you're less likely to take short, shallow breaths, which can make the pain of contractions worse.

Privacy and control

Once you're immersed in the warm waters of the pool, you're in your own world and can labour undisturbed. If the lights are dimmed and the room is quiet the effect will be heightened. It may help you to feel more in control of your body.

Buoyancy

The water bouys you up and makes you feel lighter. It's easy for you to move about, so you can make yourself comfortable. The best position for you is likely to be one that helps your baby move most easily through your pelvis. A useful rule of thumb is to keep your knees lower than your hips.

Coping with pain

Being in warm water can make it easier for you to cope with the pain of contractions. It's just the same as having a bath to soothe a tummy ache or backache. If you want strong pain relief, such as pethidine or an epidural, you'll have to leave the pool. But you can use gas and air, which is a mild pain reliever, while you are in the water.

Having a birth supporter with you

Hospital guidelines state that you should not be left alone while you are in a birth pool. This means that either your midwife or your labour partner should be with you at all times.

Your midwife may be looking after other women as well as you, which is often the case in a busy maternity unit. So you may have a student midwife assigned to you as well.

Satisfaction with your labour

Using a birth pool for labour is often such a positive experience that many women want to use one again when they have their next baby.

What are the pros of giving birth in water?

Working with gravity

Getting into a comfortable upright position may be easier if you are using a birth pool, particularly if you have a physical disability. Being upright gives you the advantage of working with gravity as your baby is born.

It may be easier to push your baby out in the water than in air. You'll be supported by the water and can use the sides of the pool for extra support.

Peaceful birth for your baby

Champions of water birth believe that the transition to the outside world is less traumatic for babies who are born in water.

The idea is that the warm waters of the pool will feel like the waters of your uterus (womb) to your baby. Babies born in water are often calm, and cry less than babies born in air.

Satisfaction with the birth

Women who have water births generally say they have had a positive experience. They say a water birth is particularly helpful when it comes to the pushing stage.

What are the cons of labouring in water?