FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – APRIL 2026
One Born Every Minute Returns – But the Conversation We Really Need to Have About Birth Fear Still Hasn’t Started
Ten years ago, Alexia Leachman – anxiety specialist and therapeutic innovator whose work spans emotional healing, measurement, and reproductive mental health – petitioned Channel 4 to portray childbirth in a more balanced way. The campaign went national: covered by the Daily Mail, The Sun, HuffPost and Metro, debated on BBC Radio 5 Live, and heard across Ireland on Spin 108.
Channel 4 axed One Born Every Minute in 2018. Now it’s coming back.
And according to Leachman, the problem she raised back then is significantly worse.
The Scale of the Problem
Birth trauma and reproductive fear have become a silent public health crisis in the years since OBEM went off air:
- A 2025 UK study found that 1 in 5 women experienced a traumatic birth. Rates of childbirth-related PTSD have more than doubled since estimates from the early 2000s and 2010 – from 2.5–2.8% to 5.9%.
- Up to 30% of UK women may experience birth trauma, according to King’s College London research.
- Perinatal mental illness more than doubled in UK primary care between 1995 and 2018 – from 3.1% to 7.4% of women needing specialist services.
- Perinatal mental health conditions now cost the NHS £1.2 billion per annual cohort of births – and £8.1 billion to society.
- In 2023, 18% of maternity services in England were rated inadequate by the Care Quality Commission, and 39% required improvement. In 2019/2020, none were rated inadequate.
- Tokophobia – the clinical fear of pregnancy and childbirth – affects an estimated 14–22% of women globally.
- A 2024 study found that fear of birth exists in women who have never been pregnant – and is directly linked to media consumption.
The NHS does not routinely screen for tokophobia. Most birth workers have no formal training to identify or support it. And social media has compounded what reality TV began – feeding women a diet of birth horror content from adolescence onwards.
Meanwhile, One Born Every Minute – a show clinically linked to increased birth fear in viewers – is returning to E4 with 12 new episodes.
Reproductive Anxiety Disorder – A New Framework
Leachman, who has worked with women affected by birth fear for over 16 years, has proposed a new diagnostic framework: Reproductive Anxiety Disorder (RAD). RAD captures the full spectrum of fear that affects women across the reproductive life course – before, during, and after pregnancy – and for which there is currently no formal clinical pathway.
Her white paper, Fear Sells, But It Doesn’t Serve – How Media Shapes Birth Trauma, Tokophobia, and Reproductive Anxiety (2025), makes the case for systemic change: in media, in clinical training, and in public health policy. It builds on a chapter she contributed to the academic volume Midwifery, Childbirth and the Media.
Her book, Betrayed By Your Biology (2025) – as far as she is aware, the only book specifically addressing tokophobia and RAD – brings this framework to a general audience.
She has also developed RAD Responsible – a storytelling integrity framework for media creators, birth workers, and educators working in the reproductive space. Its five principles – Context, Consent, Containment, Possibility and Potential, and Nervous System Awareness – give creators practical, specific tools for content that informs rather than conditions. The framework is live at fearless-birthing.com/rad-responsible.
The Opportunity: Media Can Go the Other Way
Leachman is clear that she is not calling for a ban – she never was. Her argument is that media is a modifiable factor, and that the evidence for its positive potential is equally compelling.
The Fear Free Childbirth podcast – calm, contextualised birth stories – has accumulated 1.8 million downloads across 175 countries from just 60 episodes, entirely by word of mouth. The demand for a different kind of birth narrative is demonstrably there. One Born Every Minute has the reach to meet that demand at a scale no podcast can match.
What Leachman Is Calling For
- Channel 4 to embed tokophobia awareness and RAD Responsible™ principles into the new OBEM series
- Routine screening for reproductive fear in primary care and maternity services
- Formal tokophobia and RAD training embedded into midwifery and perinatal mental health CPD
- Recognition of RAD as a standalone diagnostic category
In Her Own Words
“Ten years ago I went to the media and said: this show is making women scared of birth. I was told I was overreacting. One Born Every Minute was eventually axed – not because of concerns about mental health, but because the ratings dropped. Now it’s back. And in the decade it’s been off air, birth fear and reproductive anxiety has silently become a public health crisis. The NHS still doesn’t screen for it. Birth workers still aren’t trained to spot it. And a generation of women are delaying pregnancy, requesting caesareans out of terror, or avoiding motherhood entirely – not because they don’t want children, but because nobody has ever told them their fear has a name, a cause, and a solution.
The show is back. So am I. And this time I have the data.”
Notes to Editors
Alexia Leachman is available for interview, expert comment, and debate. She is an experienced broadcast contributor – previous appearances include BBC Radio 5 Live, Spin 108 (Dublin), and extensive national print coverage.
White papers available on request:
- Fear Sells, But It Doesn’t Serve (2025)
- The Case for RAD (2025)
Her book Betrayed By Your Biology is available now.
Alexia has published a longform Substack piece on this story at alexialeachman.com available for background reading.
Website: fearless-birthing.com
Contact: hello@fearless-birthing.com
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