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Donald Trump has, allegedly, found “the answer to autism”: Tylenol.
On Monday, Trump announced that pregnant women should dramatically limit their use of acetaminophen, known by the brand name Tylenol or internationally as paracetamol, because, he claimed, it raises the risk of autism.
This claim is not supported by science. Research into links between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and autism have not proved a causal relationship, while medical experts widely agree that growing diagnoses of autism cannot be traced back to a singular cause.
Acetaminophen can be used to alleviate fever and pain during pregnancy. Leaving those conditions untreated can carry “significant maternal and infant health risks”, according to a statement from the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine. Untreated fevers, for example, can lead to miscarriage, birth defects and premature births.
Trump’s announcement was a triumph for health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has a track record of making unproven claims about autism and autistic people. Yet it was also the latest move in another emerging campaign within the Trump administration: one that seeks to valorize “natural” pregnancy and motherhood – that is, pregnancy and motherhood without proven medical interventions – to the point where it can corrode women’s health and safety.
Over the past several months, the Trump administration has taken steps to undermine pregnant women’s access to Covid vaccines and antidepressants. These steps have been in defiance of widespread agreement among medical experts that the benefits of these therapeutics tend to outweigh the risks. In May, Kennedy, who has long questioned the safety of vaccines, said that he “couldn’t be more pleased to announce” that the CDC would no longer recommend that healthy pregnant women get vaccinated against Covid.
Then, over the summer, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) hosted a panel about antidepressant use during pregnancy. Predominantly staffed with people who have a history of antidepressant skepticism or who have been consultants in litigation over antidepressants, the panel heavily emphasized the risks of taking antidepressants during pregnancy. One of the panelists, a psychologist named Roger McFillin, said that depression “has devolved into an umbrella term” and “doesn’t even have meaning any more”.
“Are women just naturally experiencing their emotions more intensely?” he asked. “Those are gifts. They’re not symptoms of a disease.”
They very well may be symptoms of a disease. Mental health conditions contribute to almost a third of all pregnancy-related deaths in the US, according to a 2025 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Of deaths involving mental health struggles, roughly a third were suicides.
Covid, too, endangers women’s lives – and those of their babies. A 2021 study of 2,100 pregnant women around the world found that women who contracted Covid during pregnancy were 20 times more likely to die compared to those that did not catch the virus. More than 11% of women who contracted Covid also had their babies test positive for Covid.
While the Trump administration casts doubt on whether women should use life-saving remedies to protect themselves against Covid and depression, Republicans have in recent months moved to embrace at least one kind of intervention: “restorative reproductive medicine” (RRM), a constellation of therapies that purport to “restore” individuals’ “natural” fertility without resorting to in vitro fertilization (IVF).
Advocates of RRM say they are working to present women with more options, but pre-eminent medical groups such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine say that there is little evidence that RRM techniques work – and that it is effectively “a pseudonym for a basic infertility evaluation”, as one reproductive endocrinologist told the Guardian this summer.
These moves – the attacks on pregnant women’s access to Tylenol, to Covid vaccines, to antidepressants; the insistence that women should get pregnant without IVF – all adhere to a basic fallacy known as “the appeal to nature”, or the idea that something that comes from the earth is better than anything human-made.
This idea powers much of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, of which Kennedy is effectively the czar. It is also patently false.
There are reasons why you are not supposed to drink unpasteurized, or “raw”, milk. (They’re called campylobacter, cryptosporidium, E coli, listeria, brucella, and salmonella.) And there are reasons why a small cut or a stubbed toe is no longer a death sentence. (They’re called antibiotics.)
When combined with pregnancy, the illogic of the appeal to nature is stretched even further, folding in on itself like Laffy Taffy. Not only should pregnancy – and the women who do it – be handled as “naturally” as possible, but pregnancy and motherhood are themselves women’s natural states.
Authoritarian governments throughout history have sought to convince their people that this is true, in order to subjugate women and to ensure that women are reliable sources of reproduction. That’s why the Trump administration’s drive to diminish pregnant women’s access to Tylenol can’t be divorced from, say, its pronatalist interest in encouraging women to have more babies through $5,000 “baby bonuses”.
Ultimately, all this may lead to fewer options and more pain for women – including those who find parenthood fulfilling, those who are uninterested in it, and those who are everywhere in between. In fact, without Tylenol, that pain may become quite literal.
“All this pressure to become a mother and be a mother is emerging politically, but you’re not supposed to need any help or support,” the journalist Amy Larocca, author of the book How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time, said in an interview earlier this year. “You’re supposed to be able to manage it all on your own and [have] no maternity leave, no medical care, no support.”
She added: “There’s a lot of shaming of women who need help and support.”
