OLIVIA SLEDZIK VIVIDLY remembers clutching her phone in bed at midnight, crying and desperately searching the Internet for reassurance. “Do other people feel like this?” she wondered. “Why do I feel so scared?” Sledzik, who is 35 and lives in Rhode Island, was terrified of getting pregnant and having a baby—and during that late-night doomscroll a few years ago, she felt alone in her fear. This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill “I’m anxious about becoming a parent” fear; it felt insurmountable.
For a long time, Sledzik assumed she’d have kids. After she graduated from college, though, she began having second thoughts—in large part because she developed a phobia of vomiting that made morning sickness sound unbearable.
After Sledzik married her husband, in 2019, the idea of starting a family began to feel more natural again. But the pandemic hit, and they shelved the conversation. By the time the world reopened, Sledzik felt completely torn. She wanted a baby with the man she loved, but she also couldn’t shake her fears about virtually every step of the process, from pregnancy all the way up to actually becoming a mom.
In addition to her vomiting phobia, Sledzik was nervous about more serious pregnancy complications—and even death—after reading news coverage about the awful maternal mortality statistics for high-income nations like the U.S. Then there was her social media algorithm, which seemed intent on freaking her out. When she scrolled TikTok, Instagram, or Reddit, she saw videos about bizarre (and extremely rare) pregnancy side effects like losing tons of teeth and about how hard parenthood is on your finances and marriage. She worried, too, about what would happen to her personal life if kids entered the equation. “I was so scared of losing how special our relationship is,” she says. It all felt like too much.
Paralyzed by parenthood fears, Sledzik marveled at how easy and stress-free the decision seemed to be for other people. “It always felt like other people were just like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to have a baby’ so casually,” she says. “And I was like, ‘What? That’s crazy.’”
Fear Factors
IN 2026, DECIDING to become a mother feels very different than it might have even a decade ago, against a backdrop of threatened reproductive rights, societal unrest, and the fire hose of parenthood-themed social media content at our fingertips.
Women are bombarded from all angles, from news cycles churning out stories about climate change, changing abortion laws, and political chaos to Instagram scrolls serving up 12,000 different ways to pack a perfect hospital bag, endless checklists for a healthy pregnancy, and worrisome tales of physical changes like “pregnancy nose.” “Who wouldn’t be anxious, to some extent?” says Rubi Vaughn, MD, MPH, a reproductive psychiatrist and director of the division of women’s health at Montefiore Einstein in New York.
It’s extremely common to have some jitters about life-altering events like pregnancy, birth, and parenthood, Dr. Vaughn says. But for some women thinking about motherhood right now, these fears go beyond jitters. They feel all-consuming; it can take a serious toll on women’s mental health and leave them deeply uncertain about whether to become mothers at all. U.S. birth rates are declining, and fear seems to be one of many factors contributing to that trend.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with deciding not to have kids, says Merle Bombardieri, MSW, LICSW, a parenthood decision-making coach who has specialized in this topic for 40 years. But some women are held prisoner by their anxiety and information overload, opting out of motherhood not because they don’t want kids but because they’re too afraid and overwhelmed. “Fear makes it hard for them to even think about whether they’re attracted to motherhood,” Bombardieri says.
Therapists are seeing this play out in real time in their offices. “I’ve never seen the terror that I’m seeing with this generation,” Bombardieri says. She estimates that up to 40 percent of her clientele are struggling with intense pregnancy or birth fear, compared to under 25 percent less than a decade ago.
Some clients are generally anxious about becoming parents and all the ways that having children changes your life. They worry, “‘I’m going to get swallowed up, I’m going to lose my identity, I’m going to regret it, I’m going to have an awful child,’” Bombardieri says. But some of those specifically with extreme fears of pregnancy or birth fit the bill for a condition known as tokophobia.
It’s hard to say how many people in the U.S. have tokophobia, because most research on it has been conducted in other countries. That’s not entirely surprising, given the U.S.’s lackluster record on addressing maternal mental health, says Zaneta Thayer, PhD, an associate professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College who studies maternal well-being. After all, it was only within the past decade that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommended screening all pregnant women for generalized anxiety and depression.
By one estimate, around 14 percent of pregnant women worldwide experience tokophobia. But a 2023 study by Thayer reported a strikingly higher number—62 percent—among American expectant mothers during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Of course, that study took place during a singularly terrifying moment in time and was limited to people who were already pregnant, so it’s hard to know how that number compares to population-wide prevalence today.) Currently, Thayer expects that tokophobia rates are “really high” among American women.
It can be easy to write off tokophobia as a personal problem, to say that someone experiencing this extreme level of fear about something “natural” has something wrong with them. But Thayer doesn’t think that’s the case at all. “In the years I’ve spent talking to people about what they’re stressed and anxious about when they’re pregnant,” she says, “a lot of those things are caused by society itself.”
Tokophobic or not, many women feel pretty darn frightened right now.
A Parental Worldview
TAKE A QUICK look at what’s going on in the world—in our politics, on the news, on your Instagram and TikTok feeds—and you’ll start to understand. With overseas wars raging in Iran and Ukraine, sky-high living costs, an ever-worsening climate crisis, and intense political division polarizing the country, it’s not hard to imagine how the general state of the world might contribute to existential worries about having and raising children.
In fact, a recent Pew Research Center survey found that 38 percent of adults ages 18 to 49 who don’t plan to have kids cited “concerns about the state of the world” as a major reason why they’re holding back. Another 36 percent blamed financial troubles, while 26 percent mentioned concerns about the environment. Those stats track with Sledzik’s anxieties. “The general state of the world, and especially the United States,” made her fearful of becoming a mom, she says.
It’s also impossible to ignore the fact that women might literally have to look up the abortion laws in their home state before deciding to get pregnant—to see what that legislation means for their own pregnancy and a potential fetus. In a post-Roe world, doctors are often afraid to treat miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies, which can lead to sepsis or fallopian tube rupture and death. “The idea of getting pregnant is scarier for women than when we had Roe v. Wade,” Bombardieri says. Research bears that out: In a poll by the nonprofit All In Together, 34 percent of women ages 18 to 39 said they or someone they know personally has decided not to get pregnant because of concerns about managing pregnancy-related emergencies.
And then there’s our national maternal mortality statistics—22 deaths per 100,000 births, which is roughly triple that of wealthy industrialized countries like Sweden, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France, per the Commonwealth Fund.
Black women have the highest maternal mortality rate of any U.S. demographic, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that tokophobia is disproportionately common in this community, according to Thayer’s study. And whether they have diagnosed tokophobia or not, Black women often feel “a tremendous amount of anxiety about going to the hospital and not making it out alive,” Dr. Vaughn says. “I don’t think about that as a phobia. These are real facts. This is real life.”
Doomscroll 24/7
IF YOU’RE A woman of reproductive age, you probably can’t escape the topics of pregnancy and parenthood on your social feeds. You don’t have to scroll very far to come across something that could stoke anxieties. A birth horror story. A post warning about the seemingly endless ways a mother or baby can be harmed during pregnancy. A giant list of habits you should adopt to stay healthy before/during/after pregnancy. How many grams of fresh fish you should eat if you want your baby to have a healthy brain or a lower risk of disease. Yet another think piece about how kids can ruin marriages and stress out their parents. The anonymous essay about an adult who now regrets having kids. Suggestions about which “toxic” household products mom and baby should avoid. The list goes on and on and on.
All this information is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s a huge win that previously taboo topics—from infertility to postpartum depression—are now openly discussed, allowing women to share their stories and feel less alone. But the information overload can also make parents-to-be more anxious. “The Internet, I believe, is the biggest reason” why people are now afraid of becoming parents, Bombardieri says.
In some ways, it seems like some level of ignorance may be bliss when it comes to parenthood right now. You don’t have to know absolutely everything before you begin. After all, becoming a parent is one of the oldest feats known to man. Sledzik remembers asking her own mother if she was anxious about becoming a parent. The short answer: no. “She’s like, ‘I just went with the flow and I did it,’ ” Sledzik says. But that’s easier said than done when information about pregnancy and parenthood—good, bad, and ugly—feels inescapable.
Angelica Garcia, a 35-year-old living in California, loves kids and, for a long time, assumed she’d have some of her own. But as she got older and learned more about parenthood, she started to feel more uncertain. “It takes a lot of work, and you need a village,” she says.
When Garcia started having second thoughts, she wasn’t at a place in life where she felt pressured to decide. But now that she’s married and in her mid-30s, she longs for the relief of deciding one way or another. Fear holds her back. Reading and watching videos about other people’s negative reproductive experiences—difficult pregnancies, birth complications, postpartum depression, strained romantic relationships—make Garcia question whether she wants to put herself through all that. “Whenever I think about the pregnancy process and childbirth, and I read about everything that could go wrong, it just kind of scares me away,” she says.
Sledzik noticed that her social media algorithm began churning out pregnancy and parenthood content when she hit her early 30s, around the time many people she knew started families. Sledzik is a therapist and studied communications in college, so she did her best to remember that jaw-dropping posts are more likely to make a splash than the mundane, but it wasn’t always easy to stay grounded. The constant stream of content “felt really bombarding,” she says. “It just felt negative, negative, negative, negative.”
Garcia thinks the deluge of horror stories on social media and in the news actually seeded her terror of pregnancy and labor. “When I was younger, I definitely didn’t have that fear. I thought I was going to have kids,” she says. “As you get older, you kind of learn more”—and not always for the better.
Thayer, who teaches a course at Dartmouth about pregnancy, birth, and babies, says she finds it interesting that her students are simultaneously under- and overinformed when they enter her classroom. Many of them have received lackluster sex education in school but seem to know a whole lot about whatever disturbing video is trending on TikTok that week. (That video about teeth falling out during pregnancy that haunted Sledzik? Thayer’s students got hung up on it too.)
“We have these really strong ideas [about pregnancy and birth],” Thayer says. “And then we realize that a lot of those ideas have actually been shaped not by firsthand experiences, but by the media—and now, for younger adults in particular, by social media.”
That can be problematic, because the societal narrative around these topics already tends to be “inherently negative,” Thayer says. (Remember the birth scene in Knocked Up?) People with negative experiences deserve to process and share their stories, of course. But the challenge is when the negative outweighs the positive, both on social media and in pop culture, contributing to a climate of fear and anxiety that can be harmful to women’s mental health and may stop some from becoming parents, Thayer says.
To remind her students that it’s not all doom and gloom, Thayer likes to show videos of “gentle births” in her class. Many of the students are “mind-blown” that it’s possible to give birth calmly and without screaming. (It’s worth noting that “perfect” birth stories can also affect mental health, contributing to pressure to live up to certain ideals.)
“People who have a nice, calm, routine vaginal delivery are not as inclined to post about it on the Internet as someone who is upset or needing to vent,” says Caroline Pessel, MD, a maternal fetal medicine specialist with Northwell Health in New York. That may lead to a skewed perception of what pregnancy and birth look like.
The truth is, some people love being pregnant; others feel sick and uncomfortable the entire time. Someone will find that a certain prenatal supplement works for them, while someone else does not. Some labors are over in hours; others take days. Some people experience more pain than they expected during delivery; others less. Some love motherhood right away; others feel like there’s a sharp learning curve. There’s a lot of gray area and no “right” way to become a mom. But that spectrum often gets compressed and distorted online, where the most attention-grabbing content wins out and the spigot of information never turns off.
Tuning Out the Noise
SLEDZIK, WHO UNEXPECTEDLY became pregnant in 2023 and is now mom to a “perfect angel” son, has some straightforward advice for women struggling with pregnancy and motherhood fears: “Get off TikTok. Get off Instagram. Or at least curate your feed so it’s stuff that’s fun and silly as opposed to stuff that feels really daunting and really unsettling.” Remember, women have been doing this since the dawn of time—with far less information—and most of the time, things turned out okay. You probably don’t need to follow the perinatal nutritional advice coming from an IG mom or follow a questionable anti–stretch mark skin regimen from your favorite influencer.
When it comes to medical risks, resist the Internet rabbit hole and talk to your physician, Dr. Pessel says. The truth is, the majority of U.S. pregnancies do not involve any medical complications and the vast majority do not involve life-threatening ones, regardless of how it may feel when you scroll through TikTok. “It’s important to keep in touch with the news and to know what the complications can be in general, but it’s also important to individualize that for each person and keep it in context,” Dr. Pessel says. Many risks can be managed proactively, sometimes even with relatively easy interventions like dietary shifts or extra physical activity, she notes. So a healthy dialogue with your provider is important, even before you conceive.
Some people who fear medical environments find it helpful to tour a labor and delivery suite in advance so they know what to expect when the time comes, Dr. Vaughn says. And don’t be afraid to ask questions of your doctors, she adds. It’s okay to ask about how a delivery usually goes, what’s normal, and how to advocate for yourself if things aren’t going to plan. “Knowledge is power,” Dr. Vaughn says, as long as it’s coming from the right sources.
Working with a doula can also ease many anxieties. Doulas act as a guide through the birth process, making sure that parents’ emotional, informational, and physical needs are met. “Their role is really to 100 percent support the birthing person and make it the best possible experience for them,” Dr. Vaughn says. Studies even show that people who work with doulas or midwives (health care providers who generally adopt a holistic, person-centered approach to care) have better birth and emotional outcomes than those who don’t.
And just about anyone struggling with some degree of fear or anxiety about pregnancy, birth, or parenthood can benefit from working with a therapist experienced in perinatal mental health, Bombardieri says. A knowledgeable therapist can help sort out where the fears are coming from and help you move past them.
Julie Masi, a 36-year-old mom from Massachusetts with a 3-year-old son, is working through that now. She had a smooth first pregnancy but a complicated first birth and ended up needing an unplanned C-section. Afterward, she developed postpartum preeclampsia—a potentially deadly but treatable complication related to high blood pressure after birth, which forced her to stay in the hospital for several extra days.
The experience rattled Masi, who had never had a serious medical issue before. Even after she was discharged from the hospital and went home, “I was such a ball of nerves and anxiety,” she says. Her stress improved with time—but for a while, every time she checked her blood pressure at home, her anxiety shot through the roof as she worried about what the results would show.
A couple of years ago, Masi and her husband started thinking seriously about having another baby—they’d always wanted multiple kids. Eventually, she booked a preconception doctor’s appointment. But when conversation turned to the possibility of developing preeclampsia again, it “just hit me in the gut,” she says. “The same level of really severe panic and anxiety came back.” Masi wasn’t sure she could put herself through that turmoil again.
She found a therapist who helped her process her first birth and work through her fears about doing it all over again. After lots of work, she says, she and her husband felt ready to start trying again. Her emotions were complicated: a mix of excitement and nerves, happiness and apprehension. But, she says, “I can’t let this hold me back from something that I really want to do.” (Masi is currently pregnant with her second child and in her third trimester.)
Of course, at the end of the day, you may also decide not to become a mother—and that’s totally okay too. There’s a persistent narrative that the “brave” or “courageous” choice is to push past fears, but it can be just as brave to decide against motherhood in a society that still sees it as the default option, Bombardieri says.
In Masi’s case, she managed to make her peace with the uncertainty of the future. “None of us have a crystal ball,” she says. “If I want to go for it, we’ve got to go for it.”
