When Your Water Breaks Without Contractions

Sometimes your water breaks before you have contractions. What happens next? How you respond can have an impact on your labor.

You might associate someone's water breaking with the start of labor. But occasionally, your water can break without contractions, even before labor begins. What you do next depends on where you are in your pregnancy and what your health care provider advises.

If your water breaks before labor starts, it's called premature rupture of membranes (PROM). Most commonly, water breaks at the onset or at some point during labor. Read on to learn what happens and what to do if your water breaks without contractions.

What If Your Water Breaks Without Contractions Pre-Term?

The first thing you need to do if your water breaks without contractions is assess how far along you are in your pregnancy. If your water breaks before you are 37 weeks pregnant, this is called preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM).

Babies born before 37 weeks are considered premature and may need additional care after they are born. If your water breaks before 37 weeks of pregnancy, you may need medical interventions, like IV antibiotics or corticosteroids for your baby's lungs. You should call a health care provider and go to the hospital right away if your water breaks before 37 weeks of pregnancy.

What If Your Water Breaks Without Contractions at Term?

If you are full-term (over 37 weeks pregnant), sometimes it takes a few hours for contractions to kick into gear. As long as you and your health care provider are fine with it, waiting for a while may be appropriate, assuming that you and the baby are doing well.

While waiting, you should avoid the following:

• No baths
• No sex
• Nothing going into your vagina

Generally, it is safe to stay at home as long as you are not showing any signs of infection, including:

• Fever
• Foul odor
• Discolored fluid
• Fast heart rate
• Sore uterus

Antibiotics are not recommended for all pregnant people who experience PROM. Unless you have an infection, evidence shows that there are no benefits to using antibiotics, and they can have potential risks.

Ways to Start Labor After Your Water Breaks

If your water breaks without contractions, a health care provider may recommend strategies to try to start labor. Some of these may be safe to try at home with guidance from the health care provider. Other strategies will need to be completed at the hospital.

Strategies for inducing labor include:

• Nipple stimulation: You may opt to stimulate labor using natural means. You can try nipple stimulation using your hands or a breast pump. This helps produce oxytocin, a pregnancy hormone that can help start contractions.
• Walking: A walk around the house or even outside might help. Many people on social media swear by curb walking (walking with one foot on the curb and one foot on the road) to help jumpstart labor, but any type of movement can be helpful.
• Acupressure: This involves using pressure on certain spots on your body, like four fingers above your inner ankle, to help stimulate oxytocin and, in turn, labor.
• Pitocin: If a health care provider recommends it, your labor nurse might start an IV of Pitocin, a synthetic form of oxytocin that stimulates contractions in the uterus
  

Parents uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

1. Premature Rupture of Membranes. StatPearls. 2023.
2. Premature rupture of membranes. Mt. Sanai. n.d.
3. Risk factors associated with preterm labor, with special emphasis on preterm premature rupture of membranes and severe preterm labor. J Chin Med Assoc. 2020.
4. Chorioamnionitis. Cedars Sinai. n.d.
5. Antibiotics for prelabour rupture of membranes at or near term. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2014.
6. The effect of uterine and nipple stimulation on induction with oxytocin and the labor process. Worldviews Evid Based Nurs. 2015.
7. Effect of acupressure on cervical ripening. Iran Red Crescent Med J. 2015.

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