Resources for Birth & Mental Health Professionals

Tokophobia, the extreme fear of pregnancy and birth that affects millions of women, yet it’s often misunderstood or overlooked.

These resources were written to help midwives, doulas, therapists, and birth professionals understand tokophobia, recognise its impact, and learn how to better support your clients.

Start exploring now and deepen your knowledge!

Is Reproductive Fear the Root of Women’s Anxiety?

Here is a question I think the profession should be asking out loud: what if reproductive fear is not one anxiety among many, but the root of women’s anxiety, the trunk that the other branches grow from? It is a hypothesis, not a settled fact. But it is one the clinical evidence keeps pointing toward,…

RAD Responsible: Trauma-Aware Birth Storytelling for Professionals

Every professional who works with women around birth is also, whether they intend to be or not, a storyteller. The way we describe birth, in a class, a consultation, a social post, a casual aside, shapes how the women listening come to feel about their own. Trauma-informed birth storytelling is the discipline of telling those…

The Practitioner’s Guide to Tokophobia and Reproductive Fear

If you work with women through the perinatal journey, whether as a therapist, counsellor, doula, midwife or antenatal educator, here is a claim worth sitting with: a large share of the women in front of you are carrying a fear of pregnancy and birth that neither they nor you can see. Tokophobia for professionals is…

What Is Tokophobia? The Complete Guide

For years, I thought I just wasn’t maternal. I felt a deep, physical dread about pregnancy and birth, and I assumed that was simply who I was. It never occurred to me that what I was carrying had a name, that other women felt it too, or that it could be cleared. It took me…

Why So Many Birth Professionals Are Missing Tokophobia

Here is something that should bother every one of us who works with women through the perinatal journey: a fear serious enough to shape whether a woman has children at all is sitting in our caseloads, and most of the time we do not see it. Tokophobia awareness among professionals is shockingly low. This is…

Primary vs Secondary Tokophobia: What’s the Difference?

One of the first things I help a woman work out is which kind of tokophobia she is dealing with. It is not just a labelling exercise. The two have different stories, and knowing which is yours changes where we look, and where the healing begins.