Investigating the desire to have children among women affected by the earthquake according to their levels of trauma and tolerance for uncertainty

Based on the Terror Management Theory, the current study was conducted to see how the desire to have children among women can differentiate after disasters, according to their levels of trauma and tolerance for uncertainty. In this context, a sociodemographic data form, the fertility desire scale, the level of trauma after earthquake scale were fulfilled face to face, with consent given, aged between 18-45 years of 402 women, applied to the family medicine policlinic for some reason between the months of May-September in 2023, who lived through the 2023 February Kahramanmaraş centered earthquakes. The collected data was analyzed by SPSS v25 statistics program. According to the variance analyses with sociodemographic data, the desire to have children differentiated statistically significantly (p≤.001) by the educational levels of the women, which means, women who had lower educational levels had higher desire for having children. The fertility desire prediction by the levels of earthquake trauma and tolerance for uncertainty, was concluded as, as the level of earthquake trauma increased, the desire of fertility was decreased, but there was no predictable relevance found between the level of tolerance of uncertainty and fertility desire. The resulted variety of predictions made between the subscales of the fertility desire scale and the level of earthquake trauma scale, demonstrated that after disasters, fertility desire is affected by different psychological aspects. Conducting studies based on, fertility desire in a psychological aspect after disasters, will certainly help bringing to light the factors, associated population changes after disasters.