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Over the years, women have told me things they had never told anyone. Among the most quietly painful are the decisions made not from clarity, but from a fear so big it left them feeling there was no other way. I share this not to alarm anyone, but because naming it gently is how the…

When I was healing my own tokophobia, I had no idea what my own birth had been like. My mother had passed away, so I could not ask her. I decided to work on it anyway, just trusting my gut. What followed was half an hour of the deepest, most primal crying of my life,…

When I finally examined my own fear, I had a strange realisation: almost none of it was actually mine. It was a lifetime of absorbed messages about birth, soaked up from television, from overheard horror stories, from the way everyone around me talked about it. I had been collecting other people’s fear for years without…

When a woman tells me she is afraid of birth, the first thing I ask is: what is it about birth that scares you? Almost every time, once we follow the thread, we find the fear was never really about birth at all. Birth is just the thing that drags older, deeper fears into the…

For a long time I thought I just liked being organised. Lists, plans, contingencies. It took me a while to see the truth underneath it: a lot of my “organisation” was actually a fear of not knowing. And pregnancy and birth are the one thing you genuinely cannot plan your way around. No wonder it…

I hear from younger and younger women now, often before they are anywhere near thinking about babies, already carrying a heavy dread about the whole idea of it. When I started this work, the fear tended to surface in pregnancy. Now I am watching it take root in women who are barely out of their…

For years, I genuinely believed I just was not maternal. It was only later that I understood I had not actually chosen anything. My fear had quietly made the decision for me, and dressed it up as a personality trait. I want to be careful here, because some women truly do not want children and…

The day I found the word tokophobia, something in me unclenched. For the first time, my fear was not a personal defect. It was a thing, with a name, that other women had too. That is the strange power of a word: it can turn “what is wrong with me?” into “oh, this is what…

One of the things that frightened me most, once I understood my own fear, was the thought of passing it on. I did not want to hand my daughter a fear of her own body before she ever had a chance to know it differently. That thought is what made me certain this work was…