Panic fear of childbirth: what is tokophobia?



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"Just hit the word" childbirth "on the search engines to find a tsunami of horrors," said midwife Catriona Jones at the tokophobia conference, as reported in The Guardian.

The delivery is scary. But there are "normal" fears, more or less rational and surmountable, and there are others: panic fears, commonly called phobias. And just like the phobia of spiders or blood, there is that of childbirth! It's called "tokophobia" (from Greek tokos, which means childbirth).

A relationship to childbirth more than anxious

Tokophobia is not to be taken lightly since it affects 14% of women according to a study conducted by Irish scientists in 2017.

She is a real suffering for women who are victims, preventing them from conceiving a child so much fear is insurmountable for them. They then multiply the means of contraception to avoid at all costs to become pregnant, even repressing their desire to found a family.

However, some women still fall pregnant despite the phobia. In this case, it usually pushes them to request a scheduled cesarean.

Where does this phobia come from?

If the trauma can be related to childhood or to a first difficult childbirth, this paralyzing anxiety would be accentuated by social networks. Indeed, on the web many mothers tell in details their delivery and in particular the most sordid details, the complications or the obstetrical violence undergone …

"I would not say that social networks push women to be afraid to give birth, but that they contribute," explained Catriona Jones during the debate organized by the University of Hull in England.

The different types of tokophobia:

The medical profession clbadifies tokopobia in 3 different forms:

  • Primary tokophobia : fear often goes back to adolescence. Sex is very safe to avoid getting pregnant.
  • Secondary tokophobia : it manifests itself after a complicated, even traumatic birth.
  • Tokophobia as a symptom of pre-natal depression it occurs before giving birth, when the woman is already pregnant. The expectant mother simply feels unable to give birth. This may be a sign of pre-natal depression.

According to research by Irish scientists, tokophobia seems to have increased since the 2000s.

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