Targeting Tylenol Is Just Another Excuse to Blame Women for Everything
It’s a long-standing tradition to blame all manner of social ills on women, without any basis in fact.
Iused to keep a list called What’s Women’s Fault? It was quite substantial: poverty (single moms), crime (single moms again), rape (short skirts, drinking), domestic violence (women responsible for most of it), incels (women declining to date men they don’t find appealing), divorce (women file the majority of cases), population decline (replacing overpopulation, somehow also women’s fault), and of course everything that can go even a little bit wrong with pregnancy, childbirth, and children. Anyone who has dived into the literature knows that the standards for mothers are impossibly high, especially if she has a job. Unless she doesn’t have a job, in which case she’s a freeloader or an idiot. Meanwhile, the standards for fathers are basically: Does he know his children’s names?
My daughter is 38 years old, and I wish I could say things have changed for the better since I was a young mother. But no. the details have changed—it’s no longer legal for a husband to rape his wife—but the substance remains the same. There is virtually no aspect of women’s lives that the culture does not manage to infuse with doubt and fear and guilt. And that goes double for motherhood. Just ask any middle-class woman who doesn’t breastfeed her baby. It doesn’t matter if she knows intellectually that the baby will be fine, the way boomer babies like me were fine on formula; she’ll still feel selfish if she chooses not to breastfeed, and like a failure if she can’t. As a mom she is supposed to do everything humanly possible and then some to produce a perfect child. And she can never really know, can she, if down the road some small decision or incapacity will have retroactively caused indelible harm.
If anything, the standards of motherhood are higher now than in 1987. Back then, I was encouraged by my doctor to drink Guinness to “bring down the milk”—that’s taboo now. And although my doctor frowned on Tums for heartburn (which is now generally considered perfectly okay in moderation), I could have a Tylenol if I had a backache. Now, says our president, women are supposed to “tough it out” and go without, lest they give their child autism. Tough it out? Maybe that’s what he told E. Jean Carroll in that dressing room. Words cannot express how enraging it is to have Donald Trump—who has no medical education of any kind, who put Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a mad charlatan, in charge of the nation’s health, who is a convicted felon, sex abuser, and dear friend of Jeffrey Epstein, and whose contempt for women has been on full display for his entire life—tell women anything about how they should live and what they should do while undergoing one of the most painful and risky and stressful experiences a human being can go through. I mean seriously, Donald Trump, the hell with you. Go have a baby and come back and tell us all about it.
The point, as my clever daughter put it to me on the phone just now, is not just that for some pregnant women Tylenol is an essential medication, lowering fevers that are themselves a risk to the fetus. It’s that a pregnant woman should be able take it if she just has a headache! Her happiness, her well-being, and her freedom from pain matter, just the way the choice whether or not to breastfeed should be her own, for any reason. It doesn’t need to be a matter of life and death. She shouldn’t have to tough it out.
The fact is we don’t know what causes autism. We don’t even know if the statistical increase in diagnoses—almost 300 percent over the last 20 years—is real or the result of expanded definition. I knew several kids in my childhood who would be classified as high-function autistic today who were simply regarded as strange.
Moreover, mothers have been blamed for autism before. According to one school of child psychiatry popularized in the 1950s and ’60s by the immensely influential Freudian psychoanalyst and author Bruno Bettelheim, the fault lay with “refrigerator mothers.” They were cold and unloving and distant. (Refrigerator fathers were rarely part of the story, needless to say.) The harm this eventually debunked theory did to mothers and families was enormous: Not only did they face the challenge of raising an autistic child; they also got little sympathy or real help from their community or their doctors, because they had caused the problem themselves.
I would love to think that women will brush off the Tylenol warning. Unlike the refrigerator mother theory, which was widely accepted by doctors and other authority figures, the Tylenol ban goes against the recommendation of just about every medical authority on Earth. But then so does rejecting vaccines, and that only grows more popular.
Women aren’t just blamed for everything; they’re conditioned from birth to accept it. So I’m sure we’ll see plenty of mothers of kids with autism lying awake at night wondering if it was that pill they took when the backache was just too much.
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