![]() ![]() I used to think it was a given that I would be a mother. How have I ended up like this: paralysed, stuck on the window ledge, unable to go back or forward in my life, while everyone else seems to skip through to the next 'natural' stage? I feel inadequate next to those women who have been through it. I consider myself to be pretty tough in terms of what I can handle emotionally, but I can't credit myself with the physical strength or stamina required to endure giving birth, and that depresses and enrages me. Secondary tokophobics are those mothers who had a terrible experience first time around, know what they're up against and are desperate to avoid repetition at all costs (which doesn't help those in the primary division at all, confirming as it does everything we suspected). I am a primary tokaphobic, as I have never been through the process of giving birth. Sufferers can be split into two groups - primary and secondary. It absolutely disgusts me.''Ī study published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology last week found that almost half of all pregnant women who request a Caesarian section do so not because they are "too posh to push'', but because they are scared. ![]() "I haven't had children and now I can't look at anything to do with childbirth. Helen Mirren recently revealed that seeing a graphic film about giving birth during her schooldays had been a factor in her decision not to have children. Previously, the syndrome had received little or no attention, and even today few people know about it, although there must be tens of thousands of sufferers. According to her research, one in six women is tokophobic. Tokophobia - a profound dread and avoidance of childbirth - was identified as a medical condition in 2000 in a survey by Dr Kristina Hofberg in the British Journal of Psychiatry. They jump out unbidden at odd times, leaving me feeling faint and hardly able to stay on my feet. ![]() What I saw during that film was, with cruel inevitability, added to the mental library of distressing birth-related images already embedded in my brain. I suffer from tokophobic tendencies, which means that references - let alone big-screen close-ups - to pregnancy, or, even worse, giving birth, make me feel instantly nauseous and tearful. But when you're standing outside the cinema trying to accommodate someone else's viewing preferences five minutes before a film begins, you hope you can get through a rom-com without having to reveal your psychological disability - a disability that is usually greeted with "What? Oh don't be so ridiculous!''įor those who haven't seen it, Knocked Up is about an unplanned pregnancy and features a graphic delivery-room birth scene. I shouldn't have gone to see Knocked Up, last year's hit film. Even writing this now, a scene from the film flashes into my mind and I feel light-headed my insides start to twitch, and a sour taste fills my mouth. Around me in the cinema people laughed, as I sat, body twisted away from the screen and my face shielded by my coat, wondering how quickly I could toss the shopping out of my bag if I had to throw up. ![]()
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