Study Questions Inducing Labor After Woman’s Water Breaks

Challenging a long-held view, a new study concludes that doctors do not always need to induce labor when a woman’s water breaks after a full-term pregnancy. Instead, it appears that letting nature take its course is safe for both mother and baby. For years, many doctors have assumed that waiting for labor to start naturally could allow infections to set in after the water breaks. Others, however, worried that when doctors use drugs to start labor, they are more likely to have to deliver the baby by Caesarean section.

Canadian doctors studied 5,041 women in this situation. They were assigned randomly either to have induced labor or to wait up to four days for labor to start on its own. The doctors report in the New England Journal of Medicine that, in both groups, about 3% of babies had infections, and about 10% were delivered by C-sections.