The condition “tokophobia” probably means nothing to you, but doctors warn that there’s a good chance you have it.
One study suggests that six in 10 American women have the phobia — marked by a fear of giving birth.
People with tokophobia may experience anxiety attacks, avoid sex, or feel emotionally disconnected from their unborn child.
The findings come at a time when fewer women in the US are having children than ever before.
A study published last month in the journal Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health found that more than half of women in the US experienced tokophobia, or fear of childbirth, in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Tokophobia is the extreme fear of childbirth and pregnancy that mainly affects women Mayo clinic.
There are two subsets of it. Primary tokophobia occurs in people who have never been pregnant, and secondary tokophobia develops after a traumatic event during pregnancy or childbirth, such as difficult childbirth or stillbirth.
In some people, it stems from other fears, such as fear of pain (algophobia), fear of doctors (iatrophobia), and paedophobia (fear of children).
A study published last month in the journal Evolution, medicine and public health found that 62 percent of American women had a lot of anxiety and worry about childbirth.
Dartmouth College anthropologist Zaneta Thayer surveyed 1,800 American women in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, which the researchers say may have biased the results.
Half of the respondents – with an average age of 31 – had never given birth and more than a third had previously experienced a high-risk pregnancy.
The average American woman under 45 has 1.1 children, while the average man has 0.8, the National Center for Health Statistics reports.
The number of American women with at least one child has fallen to just 52.1 percent, while the number of men has fallen to 39.7 percent in 2019
However, the study has limitations.
Both prenatal and postpartum data were collected during the first 10 months of the pandemic, at a time when healthcare was under much more pressure.
The same was also true more for white women and women with higher incomes. More than 86 percent of respondents were white, and about half had an average household income of at least $100,000 a year.
More than 86 percent of the women in the survey said they were worried they wouldn’t have the supportive person in the hospital they wanted during labor because of the pandemic.
Other major concerns were that their babies would be taken away at birth if the mothers had Covid, that they would pass Covid on to their babies, and that they would be mistreated by others if they had Covid.
The researchers also noted links between the anxiety and higher rates of postpartum depression and bottle feeding instead of breastfeeding.
Despite the fact that most of the respondents were high-income white women, the researchers found that black mothers were nearly twice as likely to have a strong fear of childbirth as white mothers.
This could be due to the fact that black mothers are nearly three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than their white counterparts, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Data published this year by nonprofits Mars of Dimes Foundation found that 14 percent of black babies are born prematurely, compared to about nine percent of white babies.
Fear was also greater among women in disadvantaged communities, such as those with lower incomes and lower education.
Single women were also more anxious than women in a committed relationship.
As more women report having tokophobia, the US birth rate is gradually declining.
A report of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a branch of the CDC, reported 3.7 million births in the US in 2019, a slight decrease from the previous year.
Over a five-year period, researchers surveyed 21,441 men and women age 44 or younger across America to collect data on birth and fertility.
They found that women were more likely to have children than men, were likely to age at a younger age, and reported having more children on average.
Researchers found that 52.1 percent of women had at least one child.
This is down from 54.9 percent in 2015 — the most recent previous version of the survey — and a huge drop from the nearly 60 percent of women under 45 who were older in 2002.
An average American woman under age 45 has 1.1 children, up from 1.3 in 2002. Men fell below the figure of one per member of the population in 2010, from 1.0 to 0.9. In 2019, the average man had 0.8 children.