On Monday, President Trump announced a recommendation that pregnant women should limit Tylenol use in order to reduce autism rates. Trump’s announcement quickly turned into a cultural sensation, with countless memes and jokes responding to the absurdity of this claim on social media. However, while the recommendation may sound unreasonable, it reveals several aspects of American medical culture worth examining.
The crux of this entire situation lies in the fact that people don’t understand autism. The truth is, medical researchers still don’t know exactly what causes autism to occur in people. Scientists believe that it has to do with genetics and certain environmental factors. Because there is so much uncertainty around the causes of autism, it has opened a Pandora’s box of misinformation. When autism is oversimplified, it is misunderstood.
Trump claims that autism rates have dramatically increased in the past 20 years. True, but only because scientists now understand autism more broadly as a spectrum. Autism encompasses a wide range of symptoms. These days, many parents seek diagnoses in order to better help their children. Simply put, we now have more research and awareness of autism as a disorder compared to what we knew 50 years ago.
Trump has also claimed that the Amish have “essentially no autism.” Autism definitely exists in Amish communities; scientists have not found a group of people immune to this disorder. The claim that the Amish do not experience autism is actually misinformation used to push the narrative that unvaccinated individuals do not develop autism. Studies show that vaccines do not cause autism. The conspiracy theory was actually a result of a false study done in 1998 by Andrew Wakefield, a GI doctor from the Royal Free Hospital in London. He falsely claimed that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine caused autism to occur in 12 children after they had taken the vaccine. Not only was the study procedurally incorrect, the data was falsified and the conclusion drawn was factually incorrect. The study was retracted in 12 years.
In reality, the age at which children typically receive the MMR vaccine happens to be the age in which some children begin to display signs of autism. Wakefield would later be struck off of the medical register because of this study.
Trump has attacked the MMR vaccine as well, telling mothers, “Don’t let them pump your baby up with the largest pile of stuff you’ve ever seen in your life, going into the delicate little body of a baby….”
However, the MMR vaccine is extremely important and no evidence has been found linking it to autism. It protects against measles, mumps, and rubella, and it prevents extreme adverse effects such as pneumonia, neurological complications, and death. In fact, the MMR vaccine is extremely safe to give to children, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Trump’s attack on vaccines reflects the broader cultural shift of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement as well as the traditional (trad) movement into the American cultural sphere. This cultural shift is exactly why Trump specifically mentioned the Amish. Their lifestyle serves as a sort of ideal for conservatives—a natural life free from most modern technologies.
Acetaminophen is considered one of the safest painkillers that pregnant individuals can use, compared to ibuprofen. It is actually far more dangerous for pregnant women to allow a fever to keep going. It can lead to an increased risk in birth defects, as well as miscarriage, stillbirth, and preterm birth. Moreover, prolonged pain can also lead to severe consequences to the fetus.
The fact that Trump is so confident in telling women to just tough it out speaks to the broader history of underprescribing pain management to women, especially to women of color, particularly black women.
These biases often come from the belief that women are overexaggerating their pain level because they are perceived as hysteric and overemotional. Black women especially are still subjected to the belief that they have higher pain tolerances: a belief that originated from slavery-era views. This entire debacle is quite literally another example of people—namely men—who have next to no knowledge about women’s health trying to make decisions about it and force those decisions onto the general population of women in the United States. It’s extremely reminiscent of misinformation that has sprouted up regarding abortion. Unfortunately, politicizing pregnancy has become an extremely popular venture for politicians in this day and age, with results ranging from the overturning of Roe v. Wade to this current fiasco regarding acetaminophen.
In conclusion, no causal link has been found between the use of acetaminophen, the MMR vaccine, and the development of autism. Remember, people: correlation does not equal causation!
Julia Podgorski is a member of the class of 2028 and can be reached at jpodgorski@wesleyan.edu.
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