Discuss the benefits and risks to both mother and fetus in regard to AROM.

AROM is an intentional act of breaking the membranes around the fetus to speed up labor, which allows the fetal status observance and assessment of the amniotic fluid. Amniotomy, or AROM, has a long history of a practice that has been widely utilized by midwives and obstetricians around the world. The risks of this procedure include cord prolapse, which can cause fetal severe blood loss, also cord compression, which results in the deceleration of fetal heart rate, intra-amniotic inflammation, and fetal scalp injury (Brucker et al., 2018). There has been a recent trend in the research of AROM indicating that the practice turns out to be harmful to mothers, and it should be used only in particular cases when a patient has dystocia, or labor initiation is urgent and apparent (Brucker et al., 2018). For instance, early amniotomy can cause infectious contamination of a mother as bacteria can get into uterine cervix. There are several factors that should be considered before doing amniotomy, among which are the abnormal fetal presentation, cephalopelvic disproportion, the position of a baby’s head in the uterus (Ghafarzadeh, Moeininasab, Namdari, 2015).