On tokophobia
for those who fear pregnancy
Dead Mother by Egon Schiele (1910)
I have a twisted fascination with tradwife homestead TikToks (see: @gwenthemilkmaid and @zimocolorado). Always clad in a dainty sundress, they bake bread, walk in grassy fields and perform domestic labour while offering commentary on the current culture around womanhood: being a “traditional” woman is more fulfilling than a career, leading a “soft” and “slow” feminine life is underrated, man and woman He created them, and don’t trust the government. Antithetical to the pillars on which I’ve based my worth, my life, I react to these mommy-influencers strongly. I seethe with anger, I shed tears of confusion, I shake my fist at their naivete, but still I scroll with wanton fascination. A part of me wonders, have these women cracked the code? Have I been fed lies? Libertarianism aside, at the root of their controversial homestead-politics is one crucial topic that has captured the minds of feminists for centuries and sits at the horizon of every female’s life: motherhood.
Feminists across time have opined on motherhood. Christine de Pizan, the trailblazing medieval writer, argued motherhood was a divine vocation, and for this reason, women offered unique wisdom to the world. On the other hand, Simone de Beauvoir described pregnancy as a traumatic experience for women, a “parasitic body” that causes “monstrous swelling.” Julia Kristeva, the semiotician of Freudian influence, described pregnancy as “abject” — an experience which blurs the lines between the self and the other — in her essay Powers of Horror. In every child’s development, Kristeva builds upon Lacan and theorizes that before infants can recognize themselves as a “self”, they must distinguish themselves from the mother, a process which suppresses the maternal “one-ness” that defies individual subjectivity. This is one compelling theory I believe can be used to explore tokophobia, the fear of pregnancy.
According to Kristeva, motherhood and pregnancy bends our rigid concept of time and individuality. We supposedly have control over ourselves and our bodies, but pregnancy disturbs and renders fluid and ambiguous our idea of a singular subject and its autonomy. “Abject” things remind us of the universe’s true lack of structure or singularity. The abject is a jarring reminder of our lack of control, what we have “primally repressed” during the development of the ego, and a reminder of from where we came and where we will return. By crossing the boundary of constructed reality, pregnancy is by this definition abject.
Tokophobia is clinically classified into two categories: primary and secondary. Secondary tokophobia is observed in pregnant women who have been mothers before and experienced a traumatic pregnancy, whereas primary tokophobia, the one I will be focusing on in this article, is typically onset at adolescence and is observed in women who have never been pregnant. In the medical journals and articles available on the internet, tokophobia is based on a fear of pain, with tokophobic mothers avoiding a vaginal birth at all costs and opting for unnecessary cesarean sections.
I have felt strong primary tokophobia even though pregnancy is nowhere in my near future. At the sigh of a pregnant woman, I feel an unsettled churning in my stomach and a sense of panic, followed by guilt for seeing an innocent mother going about her day with such revulsion. And the thought of me pregnant? I think I would faint or cry or vomit at the sight of my own body morphing beyond recognition and beyond control. Although I do fear the pain of pregnancy and the “monstrous swelling” that Beauvoir describes and clinical tokophobia recognizes, I feel as though my own fear goes much beyond the fear of my own physical limits. I wonder if the same goes for my female peers. This is why Kristeva’s investigation into the “abjection” of pregnancy strikes a chord. It is not only the woman’s bodily change that makes pregnancy feared, but what that bodily change means for her position in the established order.
Given our capitalist economy, economic productivity is a far more visible and socially rewarding pathway than motherhood. Presented with a hypothetical choice between capital accumulation and intellectual stimulation versus the unpredictable, emotionally exhausting nature of motherhood, focusing on one’s career is the easy, obvious choice. Personally, motherhood holds too many unknown variables, and if it risks looking anything like those tradwife TikToks, who wouldn’t try to steer clear?
Additionally, taught to value the sexual freedom of our youths and to meet the picture-perfect body standards of bikini models, a swelling of the body represents a painful departure from the ideal most women have chased their whole lives. A lot of scholarship exists on how different marginalized bodies can be seen as abject because they oppose the physical norm, such as fat bodies or Black bodies. Pregnancy is no different.
Kristeva speaks of two kinds of mother. The first is the “ideal, artistically inclined, dedicated to beauty, she is… the focus of the artist's gaze who admits he has taken her as a model.” The other maternal image is tied to “suffering, illness, sacrifice.” Kristeva writes, “[t]his kind of motherhood, the masochistic mother who never stops working, is repulsive and fascinating, abject.”
In her book The Heroine’s Journey, Maureen Murdock speaks of how women see their mother as a pitiful character whose fate they strive to avoid at all costs. Growing up, they reject her in favour of their father until they are forced to reconcile their own womanhood, their own desire for motherhood (this was a great read btw!) The mother almost acts as the daughter’s Freudian shadow self.
If tokophobia is truly rooted in a fear of the abject, the abject is one’s transformation into a loony, husband-worshipping milkmaid or a deformed person who can no longer frolic with the careless confidence of youth. It is rooted in a fear of departure from holding power in the established order.
To maintain your position in the established order once you become a mother is a near–impossible ordeal. To both have a thriving career and be a present mother is an undertaking that requires an incredible support network… or an incredible amount of money. The average metropolitan woman may struggle to afford a full time nanny or 8 years of daycare. She likely also lives a life isolated from the traditional networks willing to babysit, such as parents, sisters and aunties. Thus, she hurtles towards the precipice of choice before the “biological clock” expires. Although a handful of privileged mothers will be able to somehow balance their self actualization with their parenting, in general, industrialized societies are not set up to support motherhood. They are not designed to make it a fulfilling or empowering experience, despite it being an essential one. Thus, to fear motherhood, to avoid pregnancy, is not only logical — it is a matter of survival.
I believe modern tokophobia is rooted in a survival instinct. Unfortunately, however, that instinctual fear keeps me from actualizing and embracing my own power. When women such as myself express disgust at pregnancy, it inadvertently rings as a sort of internalized misogyny. Over the course of history, the patriarchy has kept a veil of fear over women’s bodies and sexual power as a form of control, and now, women have internalized the patriarchy and lost understanding of their inherent value. It props up the misogynistic notion of the female body as “other” and leads women to see the procreative power of their own body as a disgusting, or a loathsome ordeal resulting in a scary social abjection, because, well, it often is.
In order to combat the oppressive, self-loathing tokophobia symptomatic in our “modern” (more like regressive) societies, social structures must be radically re-designed with motherhood first instead of motherhood last, motherhood as abject. Rethinking community relations in the role of parenting is essential. When we can frame mothering as a collective effort, from the scary mysteries of pregnancy to the raising of a child, we will no longer feel like motherhood is antithetical to our personhood and our economic security. A woman’s dual success in her career and motherhood requires a less individual–oriented model of living. Let’s not dismiss the tried and true inter-generational home. When a friend gets pregnant, she is not a social outcast — rally around her and share your wealth and time with her. Our society currently views pregnancy as a roadblock to wealth and status. And what is more abject than that in a capitalist society? We cannot keep measuring our worth in capital.
This article written for the mom blog Motherly puts it well. The frustrated author exposes how women are expected to be perfect mothers and perfect employees without the communal support systems their ancestors had. Motherhood has become a draining, overwhelming and isolating ordeal. Lack of childcare from traditional networks or lack of benefits offered for part-time jobs force women into decisions that aren’t holistic. “There are no neighborhoods full of kids or grandmothers on the front porch to play with our children while we work or rest or dream up creative solutions to our dilemmas. This lack of breaks and alone time has us cut off from our creative flow and unable to rest our nervous systems in order to feel sane, inspired, and high functioning.” This means that the cities we live in aren’t even designed with motherhood in mind. It is no wonder motherhood inspires fear. The way our current culture is set up, it should be feared.
Women (and other people with uteruses) must reconcile with the power our bodies hold or else the polarization of feminism will only continue to grow. Gender essentialist conservatism and the re-emergence of trad-wifes are symptomatic of an economy and a society that has failed women. The future of feminism depends on the willingness to bridge our bodies with our minds when we have been told they must be at odds. To bridge our individual successes with our community when we have been told they must be at odds. To overcome the sexism that has hardened us and the sexism we’ve internalized, it will truly take a village.
If we keep believing pregnancy and motherhood is an individual battle with ourselves, we will succumb to that battle. Even if motherhood eventually is not the choice for everyone, an insistence on collective life that de-centres the patriarchy and the myth of individual success can ease our cultural tokophobia.
References:
Linda M. G. Zerilli. “A Process without a Subject: Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva on Maternity.” Signs 18, no. 1 (1992): 111–35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174729.
Hofberg, Kristina, and Ian Brockington. “Tokophobia: An Unreasoning Dread of Childbirth: A Series of 26 Cases.” The British Journal of Psychiatry 176, no. 1 (2000): 83–85. doi:10.1192/bjp.176.1.83.
“Maternal Abject.” O’Reilly, Andrea. Encyclopedia of Motherhood. SAGE Publications, 2010.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror : an Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Murdock, Maureen. The Heroine’s Journey. 1st ed. --. Boston, Mass: Shambhala, 1990.