“I think you shouldn’t take it, and you shouldn’t take it during the entire pregnancy,” Trump said in reference to acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. “Ideally you don’t take it at all, but if you can’t tough it out or if it’s a problem, then you’re going to end up doing it.”
Pregnant women shouldn’t take health guidance from Trump or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Worst Health and Human Services Secretary Ever™. “I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me,” he told a congressional committee in May. That’s the only advice anyone should take from Kennedy about anything.
For years, Tylenol has been the only drug recommended by obstetricians to treat pain and fevers in pregnant women. It is considered safe when taken in small doses for a short period of time.
Studies have shown that fevers, especially early in pregnancy, may cause some birth defects. Neither Trump nor Kennedy mentioned the effects that fevers can have on a developing fetus.
I’ve had friends who became obsessed with everything they did while pregnant. They fussed over hair care products and makeup. They shunned certain spices. Some clung to stubborn myths passed down through generations about which foods they should and shouldn’t eat, what exercises were safe, or the best positions for sleeping, especially near their due date.
These very rational women were so focused on doing everything right for their baby that they constantly second-guessed whether they were doing something wrong. These are the very anxieties that Trump’s gaslighting of pregnant women will exacerbate.
The Trump administration’s targeting of women’s behavior as the basis for autism evokes the disgraceful mid-20th-century era of so-called refrigerator mothers, when the medical establishment widely believed and falsely claimed that autism in children was caused by cold and emotionally distant mothers.
During a CNN interview on Wednesday, Dr. Natalie Crawford, a fertility physician, said, “When you have somebody who’s leading the country giving information and who’s not trained in medical facts … it can be harmful for patients.”
In the same segment, Karen Kossow, the mother of two autistic children, called Trump’s comments about Tylenol and pregnancy “incredibly disheartening” and “dangerous.”
“I think that for those of us, like myself, who did take it during pregnancy, it just kind of comes back to the idea that when it comes to autism, a lot of times it’s the mother’s fault, the mother did something different or did something wrong,” she said. “We’re the one bearing most of the caregiving burden and the struggles of supporting our children, and it just feels like another burden we have to bear.”
Even former president Barack Obama, during a recent appearance in London, weighed in on what he called “the spectacle of my successor in the Oval Office making broad claims around certain drugs and autism that have been continuously disproved.”
“The degree to which that undermines public health, the degree to which that can do harm to women who are pregnant, the degree to which that creates anxiety for parents who do have children who are autistic … All of that is violence against the truth,” Obama said.
Trump’s comments are yet another example of uninformed men telling women what to do with their bodies and health. By ignoring other factors that may cause autism, the president plants the blame squarely on the shoulders of pregnant women. In Trump’s misstatements, Tylenol isn’t at fault as much as the women unwilling to “tough it out” when they suffer fevers or pain.
The president leads a pronatalist party that increasingly views women as incubators and measures their worth in the number of healthy babies they can bear. (Of course, the quiet part is that conservatives only want more white babies.) But Republicans propose nothing to ease the path to or alleviate the heavy load of motherhood.
Trump’s blaming autism diagnoses on pregnant women’s use of a doctor-recommended drug shows this president’s blatant disregard for their well-being. It will only create confusion for women trying to protect themselves and their unborn children.