From menstrual cramps to post-childbirth pain to medical procedures performed without any anesthesia to chronic pain, medicine has been politicized to ignore women’s pain. In essence, there is a not-so-subtle expectation that women should endure pain silently. The Trump administration’s latest guidance on Tylenol use during pregnancy continues this pattern.
Tylenol has been one of the few safe medications for pregnant women to use for their pain. Now, the Trump administration claims that the use of Tylenol during pregnancy leads to a child’s increased diagnosis or risk of autism. The administration warns that pregnant women should steer clear of the medication.
This abrupt and troubling directive raises serious questions: Why is women’s pain so often disregarded in America? Why are pregnant people shamed?
On one hand, they are expected to ignore their own health and safety, including foregoing basic pain relief. On the other hand, they are inundated with messages that they risk harming their pregnancies or are at fault for any outcomes that are shy of perfection. According to this logic, autism ultimately is the fault of women.
Women are being told their pain does not matter, that their suffering is preferable to the “risk” outlined by a baseless political dogma dressed up as science.
‘Tough it out’
That was President Donald Trump’s message as he stood alongside Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after announcing federal health officials have agreed to discourage Tylenol use during pregnancy.
Trump declared: “Taking Tylenol is not good … I’ll say it. It’s not good.” He claimed there was “no downside to not taking it.” He then instructed that women must “fight like hell” not to take the medication.
Major medical organizations pushed back quickly. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists criticized the administration’s message as “irresponsible,” emphasizing that the science is far from conclusive.
After Trump’s news conference, the Food and Drug Administration issued its own announcement, stating it is essential to note that “a causal relationship [between taking Tylenol during pregnancy and an increased diagnosis of autism] has not been established and there are contrary studies in the scientific literature.” The FDA instructed physicians to consider minimizing the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy for routine low-grade fevers, but echoed its admission that a causal relationship has not been established.
Other administration officials tried to soften the message. One day after Trump’s statements, Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, acknowledged that pregnant women with high fevers would likely still be prescribed Tylenol. And two days later, Vice President JD Vance advised women to “lean on their doctors.”
The history of dismissing women’s pain
Even with the FDA’s careful clarification, and despite Oz’s and Vance’s attempts to soften the message, it matters that the president of the United States used his platform to issue a blunt directive: Don’t take it. His words carry far more than caution — they reduce women’s choices to a single, punishing message: Endure the pain.
There are numerous examples that illustrate this long-standing pattern. Chronic pain conditions affecting only women, such as endometriosis, interstitial cystitis, vulvodynia, and pelvic girdle syndrome, are routinely minimized. So, too, are conditions that happen to be more common in women, like migraines, rheumatological disorders, and fibromyalgia. Pelvic pain is still brushed off as “normal period pain” instead of ovarian cysts.
Women report their pain is disregarded, and they are often told symptoms tied to menstruation are “normal” and do not warrant attention. Many have described being left to bleed for hours after miscarriage and sent home with only paracetamol (a.k.a. acetaminophen), or suffering severe pain from fibroids or endometriosis, but told it was “all in their head.”
Postpartum pain also goes unrecognized; women have reported being ignored or trivialized and left to navigate care alone.
The disregard is embedded in medical practice. Gynecological procedures, from J. Marion Sims’ fistula surgeries without anesthesia on enslaved Black women to modern IUD insertions often performed without pain relief, show how women’s suffering has been normalized.
Indeed, only a few months ago, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists finally issued official guidance recommending pain management for cervical and uterine procedures — a recognition that what women have long reported as excruciating does, in fact, warrant attention and relief.
Women’s pain is underestimated, gaslighted, pathologized as psychological, or dismissed as an exaggeration.
Apart from pain tied to female anatomy, women also wait longer to be seen by physicians, leading to worse outcomes. Young women with chest pain are less likely to be triaged as emergent, given cardiac testing, or even admitted compared with men. Gender bias is also evident in the treatment of abdominal pain: Despite similar pain scores, women are less likely to receive painkillers, particularly opiates, and wait longer for medication.
Underlying all of this is bias and disregard: Women’s pain is underestimated, gaslighted, pathologized as psychological, or dismissed as an exaggeration.
The Tylenol guidance continues this trend, stripping away one of the only safe and accessible tools pregnant women have to manage their pain while offering nothing in its place.
The realities of pregnancy
Pregnancy brings a host of physical and psychological challenges: headaches, cramps, muscle pain, backaches, and fatigue. And pregnant people are still human beings who also experience everyday ailments like arthritis, toothaches, ear infections, and fevers.
It is also a medical fact that untreated fevers can harm a fetus. Tylenol has long been the only widely recommended medication to manage these symptoms safely. Without it, what are pregnant people supposed to do?
This is not a minor inconvenience. Consider the realities of pregnant women: many work full time, juggle childcare, commute in traffic, and run households, all while managing the physical toll of pregnancy. To suggest they should simply endure splitting headaches or shooting back pain for nine months is to erase their humanity.
Trump insisted there was “no downside” to avoiding Tylenol. But this, the expectation that women live in constant, untreated pain, is a very real downside. It disregards women’s well-being and ignores their roles in families, workplaces, and communities.
The idea that women should lie in a dark room with a cold cloth on their foreheads instead of taking safe, accessible medication is not healthcare. It is indifferent to their health, their well-being, and their livelihoods.
The harm of fearmongering
Even worse, this alarmist guidance fosters guilt and stress.
Pregnant people are told that helping themselves might harm their baby, forced into impossible moral calculations over something as simple as taking a pill for relief. There is also an unspoken assumption in these warnings that autism itself is a frightening or undesirable outcome — a stigmatizing framing that deserves its own commentary.
What we do know is that stress can be harmful during pregnancy, contributing to complications and poor outcomes. This policy essentially guarantees more suffering while offering no safe alternatives.
And what is all this based on? Limited and inconclusive evidence.
For Trump to issue such sweeping guidance without providing alternative pain relief, or even a research plan to protect women’s health, is reckless. It is fearmongering dressed up as public health.
Pregnant women deserve more
Pregnant women deserve more than the government’s medical misinformation and disregard. They should not be asked, or expected, to bear pain as a matter of policy.
If this administration truly cares about children, it must also care about mothers’ well-being. This latest guidance treats women’s pain as an afterthought, a problem to be ignored rather than addressed.
The choice should not be between enduring pain and living with guilt. The choice should be to trust women, respect their experiences, respect the scientific process, and invest in solutions that address both maternal and fetal health.
Anything less is not science; it is inhumane.