Let’s Change The Conversation
This White Paper explores how media-driven narratives about
pregnancy and childbirth are fuelling a silent epidemic of reproductive fear and trauma.
Drawing on emerging research, real-world case studies, and therapeutic insights, the paper introduces Reproductive Anxiety Disorder (RAD) — a proposed diagnostic framework for understanding how culturally conditioned fear of birth affects women long before pregnancy.
The paper also presents the Fear Funnel, a five-stage model that explains how media exposure and early trauma become embodied, influencing maternal choices, outcomes, and generational cycles.
Through a multidisciplinary lens, the work advocates for narrative change, emotional education, and systemic reform — inviting media creators, birth professionals, and policy-makers to rethink their role in shaping the future of birth.
Be RAD Responsible
calling time on our fear culture
Fear has become the cultural soundtrack to childbirth. And the media — both traditional and digital — is the composer.
From high-drama hospital scenes on reality TV to TikTok horror stories, women a reabsorbing fear-based narratives about birth from an early age. These stories don’t just inform, they condition.
Over time, they shape beliefs, hardwire trauma responses, and rewire the body’s ability to birth physiologically. And yet, they are widely consumed a “education”.
This white paper is an evolution of the work Alexia presented in Midwifery, Childbirth and the Media and offers her updated position on how media contributes to what she now frames as Reproductive Anxiety Disorder (RAD) — a culturally conditioned, trauma-linked anxiety disorder affecting women of reproductive age, many of whom aren’t even pregnant yet.
As a former sufferer of primary tokophobia and now a birth educator, podcaster, healer and creator of the Head Trash Clearance method, she has worked with hundreds of women worldwide, many of whom share a similar journey: raised in a media environment saturated with fear, entering pregnancy already terrified, and finding little support to unlearn what they’ve absorbed.
This paper brings together:
- Alexia’s personal journey and professional insights
- Emerging academic research on birth fear, anxiety, and trauma
- Case studies and real-world examples from her therapeutic work
- A new model — the Fear Funnel — to show how fear becomes trauma
- A practical call to action for how we can shift the narrative
- It is aimed at policymakers, birth professionals, educators, content creators, and women themselves — because every stakeholder has a role to play in rewriting the story of birth.
This paper is not an attack on the media.
It’s a call for responsibility and an invitation.
If media can shape fear, it can also shape freedom.
If stories can traumatise, they can also heal.
It’s time we chose to tell stories that serve.
