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!

You’ll Be Shocked How Many of Your Clients Have Tokophobia

I am going to make a claim that might sound exaggerated, and then explain why it is not: you almost certainly have clients with tokophobia right now, and neither you nor they realise it. If you work with women in any perinatal or women’s health capacity, the numbers are far higher than the official figures…

I Don’t Want Kids – Do I Have Tokophobia?

For most of my life I would have told you, quite firmly, that I just was not maternal. I believed it. It was only later that I understood my fear had been quietly speaking for me the whole time. So I hold this question gently, because I know how convincing the “I don’t want kids”…

How to Screen for Fear of Childbirth (and Why Standard Tools Miss It)

Screening for tokophobia sounds like it should be simple: use a fear-of-childbirth questionnaire and read the score. In practice it is harder than that, because the tools we have were built for one narrow situation, and reproductive fear is far wider than that situation allows. Here is how to think about screening so you actually…

My Tokophobia Story

People sometimes assume I do this work from the outside, as an expert who studied the fear. I did not. I do it because I lived it. This is my tokophobia story: where it began, the years I spent not understanding it, the shock that forced me to face it, and how I came out…

Using the PIRP With Perinatal Clients

If you support women around pregnancy, birth and motherhood, one of the hardest parts of the work is simply knowing where to start. A woman arrives frightened, often unable to articulate what she is most afraid of, and you have limited time. The Perinatal Inner Readiness Profile, the PIRP, is a perinatal assessment tool I…

Tokophobia and Mental Health

When my tokophobia was at its worst, I was also wrestling with anxiety and depression, and I treated them as separate problems. They were not. Once I cleared the reproductive fear at the root, a surprising amount of the rest came with it. That experience, repeated again and again in my clients, completely changed how…