How It Started
Cura was born the way our children were — in water, through patience, and out of a need we couldn't ignore.
First Water Baby
She was conceived just before the pandemic fully sank its teeth in, and born at the height of the lockdowns. We had always been drawn to birthing at home, and when hospital restrictions made staying home a necessity, that pull became our path.
It was an eighteen-hour labor — an asynclitic presentation with a nuchal hand — and I leaned hard on hot water to cope, spending most of those hours in the tub. But the water ran out far too fast. Loving family members stood behind me, pouring freshly boiled water into the tub to keep the temperature up. Somewhere in the middle of all that, between contractions and kettles, the first flicker of an idea appeared: there had to be a better way to keep a birth tub warm.
Second Water Baby
By our second, we'd figured out how to take the regulator off the water heater. It helped — but being responsible for draining water and refilling the tub pulled me straight out of Labor Land, exactly where a laboring person doesn't want to be. We knew we weren't done having children, and we knew this wasn't the answer. So we started talking, in earnest, about what a real product might look like.
Third Water Baby
Our third is the one who pushed us from talking to building. The week of his birth, the water heater in our apartment broke — and we weren't sure it would be replaced in time. That was the moment the idea stopped being a someday and became a now.
Cura is born
Everything we learned across three labors — the kettles, the cooling water, the moments pulled out of focus when we most needed to stay in it — went into building a birth tub heater that simply keeps the water warm so you can stay focused on the most important day of your life.
We made it because we needed it. We're sharing it so you won't have to improvise the way we did. Birth already requires you to think about so many things; the temperature of your water shouldn't be one!
Development
As with the growing of a human, building Cura has taken a lot of work and a lot of time. We set out to design and produce a totally new tool, something that did not yet exist anywhere we could find; a circulating water heater that could plug into the wall.
The Problem
When you use water as a tool during labor the temperature of the water matters. Warm water is relaxing and soothing, which is ideal to aid the laboring woman in coping with surges. But what do you do if labor is very long? You fill your pool as the first few contractions start but 5 hours later that water will no longer be to temperature. Draining a birth pool is a lot of work, scooping out water to reheat is annoying, and even draining and refilling a bath tub is disruptive and distracting.
Or what if you don’t have access to a water heater? Perhaps you live in a van or camper or, like us, have your water heater completely die? Filling a birth tub with warm water becomes impossible which limits your ability to choose water birth.
Current Fixes
Two of the most common solves to this problem are boiling water on a stove in pots and utilizing an immersion water heater. These are easy and relatively successful (we used the stove method with Baby #1 and considered an immersion heater with Baby #2). However, there are many issues with these solutions:
- It’s very disruptive to have buckets of water being scooped out and poured in while you’re laboring.
- Controlling the temperature of the water is impossible and it is often too hot which is unsafe.
- The water temperature is consistently inconsistent.
- Someone has to be in charge of taking, heating, and returning.
Water is an invaluable tool for many laboring women but these issues can create far too high a barrier and prevent access.
The Solution
The solve to this problem needed to have a few key characteristics:
- It needed to be able to heat water while it and also the laboring woman were in the tub.
- It needed to be able to plug into a wall.
- It needed to be able to automatically regulate and maintain the water temperature over a long period of time.
- It needed to self prime.
- And it needed to be small and quiet!
Simultaneously, this felt easy and like a tall order. Tankless water heaters are not new tech but they exclusively exist in a form that requires an electrician to come hard wire it into the house. This was significantly more permanent and expensive than was reasonable for us so we set out to design our own.
Production
Over the next five years we worked to find a manufacturer who would be able to build this for us, and eventually designed and received our first few prototypes. We had almost all the issues worked out and money saved up, ready to pay the deposit on our first order when the manufacturer decided to double their price days before we were to send payment. Back to square one we went!
This, however, ended up a blessing. The previous version worked but it was not perfect. The pump would work most of the time but any little mistake would cause it to fail and require that the user go through a fiddly process of resetting in order to get the pump circulating again. On top of that, the interface was confusing. We wanted to produce something that would be easy to use, that you could set and forget, because the last thing we want is to introduce a failure point in what should be a seamless water birth experience.
Our current manufacturer proved to be a partner. The primary friction point was figuring out how to create a system that self-primed (i.e. one that automatically begins pumping without having water manually added to it) because a self priming pump small enough to fit into the housing either does not exist or is not available to us. So a custom pump had to be first 3D printed, tested, and then produced just for us!
This manufacturer also helped us solve the user interface issues. Now, the Cura Birth Tub Heater is extremely easy to use with buttons that are intuitive, because the last thing you want is to be fiddling with technology while giving birth!
You can check out all the specs on our birth tub heater here. We can't wait to be a part of your birth story!