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!

Can You Overcome Tokophobia? (Yes – Here’s How)

This is the question I am asked more than any other, usually with a held breath behind it. And it is the one I most love to answer, because the answer is a big, clear yes. I know that for certain, not just because I overcame my own tokophobia, but because I have watched hundreds…

Why Tokophobia Belongs in Mental Health, Not Maternity

Where a condition lives determines who looks for it, who is trained in it, and who gets helped. And tokophobia lives in the wrong place. We have filed it under maternity, when it is, at its core, a mental health condition. That single misfiling explains a great deal of why so many women fall through…

Tokophobia and Your Relationship

I avoided the conversation about children with my own partner for eight years. Eight years. That is how powerfully tokophobia can sit in the middle of a relationship without ever being named. When I finally faced it, so much that had quietly strained us started to make sense, and to ease.

The Tokophobia Prevalence Problem

Ask how common tokophobia is and you will get a tidy-sounding answer: somewhere around 14 to 22 percent of pregnant women, with figures up to 30 percent for severe fear of childbirth in some studies. I want to make a case that every one of those numbers is an undercount, and that the real reach…

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…