By LAURIE KELLMAN
From the pulpit of the presidency, Donald Trump offered some advice to pregnant women: “Tough it out” before taking Tylenol.
Nine times in all, Trump said expectant mothers should suffer through their discomfort instead of reaching for acetaminophen — or paracetamol in countries outside the U.S. — to cure their fevers or headaches, despite the drug being one of the few painkillers that pregnant women are allowed to take.
“Fight like hell not to take it,” Trump instructed at a Monday news conference meant to address autism. He added that if pregnant women absolutely have to take Tylenol, that’ll be something that they “work out with themselves.”
What many women and experts heard was the latest example of a man telling women how much physical pain they should endure — and an age-old effort to blame mothers for their babies’ autism.
“His use of ‘tough it out’ really was infuriating because it dismissed women’s pain and the real danger that exists with fever and miscarriage during pregnancy,” said women’s rights advocate and social media influencer Amanda Tietz, a 46-year-old mom of three in Wisconsin, in an email. “Not to mention the pain we can experience in pregnancy that can be debilitating.”
Others saw a man opining — again, without evidence that maternal use of Tylenol causes autism or ADHD in children — on mothers, children with disabilities and their health at a time when studies show pain suffered by women is frequently dismissed. Women’s health and their autonomy are especially fraught issues in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in 2022 to strip away constitutional protections for abortion, a deeply personal change for Americans nearly a half century after Roe v. Wade. The debate now roils state legislatures nationwide.
“Yesterday 5 powerful men stood together in the WH and shamed: Pregnant women, told to ‘tough it out’ through pain; Moms of autistic kids, blamed for their child’s condition; Autistic people, called broken & in need of fixing,” Trump’s former surgeon general, Jerome Adams, posted on social media. “Can we all be kinder and less stigmatizing?”
Three women also spoke at Monday’s press conference and thanked Trump: Dorothy Fink, the acting assistant secretary at HHS; and Jackie O’Brien and Amanda Rumer, two mothers who said they have autistic children.
Dr. Nicole B. Saphier of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center said pregnant women generally are advised to take acetaminophen only under medical supervision, when necessary and at the lowest effective dose. But equally important — and missing from Trump’s message — was that untreated fever or severe pain can also pose serious risks to mothers and babies, she said.
“For decades, women have endured a paternalistic tone in medicine. We’ve moved past dismissing symptoms as ‘hysteria,’” Saphier, who also is a Fox News medical contributor, wrote in an email. “The President’s recent comments on Tylenol in pregnancy are a prime example. Advising moderation was sound; delivering it in a patronizing, simplistic way was not.”
Trump is not known for a delicate touch around policy where women are concerned. Ahead of the 2016 election, he erupted over tough questioning by Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, later telling CNN: “You can see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” He’s got a special playbook for female opponents that includes put-downs about their appearance, their emotional stability and their intelligence.
There’s a long history of men holding forth, sometimes incorrectly, about women’s reproductive health. Former Missouri Republican Rep. Todd Akin sank his 2012 U.S. Senate campaign with remarks about what constituted “legitimate rape.” Others have erred by suggesting publicly and falsely that rape victims can’t get pregnant.
History offers a long list of men making medical policy for women based on the beliefs of their time — and, some say, suspicion about the power of women to create and shape their unborn babies. A nearly half-century-old theory, long discredited, held that “refrigerator mothers” — cold or distant figures — were responsible for their children’s autism.
Trump’s advice “took me straight back to when moms were blamed for autism,” said Alison Singer, founder of the Autism Science Foundation. “He basically said, if you can’t take the pain, if you can’t deal with the fever, then it’s your fault.”
Trump’s “tough it out” advice is familiar to Mary E. Fissell, a professor of medical history with Johns Hopkins University. “It’s the classic blame-the-mother …over and over again,” she said. The “maternal imagination,” for example, was a principle once thought to influence the way a baby forms.
“It’s the idea that what a pregnant woman desires or feels or imagines will shape the form of her unborn child,” said Fissell, who focuses on 17th- and 18th-century medical history.
Trump offered at least one moment of introspection during his news conference, acknowledging the awkward nature of his directive.
“You know, it’s easy for me to say tough it out,” the president allowed. “But sometimes in life or a lot of other things, you have to tough it out also.”
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