Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have declared that paracetamol, known in the United States as Tylenol, causes autism if taken by pregnant women. It is a statement without evidence, without science, and utterly without shame. Every credible medical expert has dismissed it. But the damage is already done.
Once the words leave their mouths, they seep into the bloodstream of public discourse. Pregnant women, already navigating the exhausting minefield of ‘dos and don’ts’ during pregnancy, are left wondering whether the safest and most widely used pain relief in the world will harm their child. Mothers of autistic children are left with a new, cruel suspicion: did I do this? Did one swallowed pill cause my child’s brain to be the way it is? Autism, already weaponised by conspiracy theorists and bad actors, becomes yet again a scapegoat.
This can only be about control. Control of women’s bodies, women’s choices, women’s lives. Two men - wealthy, privileged, insulated from the realities of pregnancy and pain - sit on high and preach to women to “tough it out” (Sky News, 2025).
But here lies the obscenity: Donald Trump has never “toughed out” anything in his gilded life. This is a man who dodged the Vietnam draft with the excuse of bone spurs; a man so fragile he removes comedians from television for mocking him; a grotesque man-baby who demanded a Coca-Cola dispenser be built into his desk in the Oval Office. His skin is paper-thin, his appetite for comfort unending, his existence pampered since birth. And yet, from this throne of privilege, he dares to hector women - pregnant women, women in pain - that they must endure without safe relief.
The cruelty is the point. This is about so much more than autism and paracetamol. It is about reshaping women’s role in society: fewer choices, lower expectations, and more suffering presented as virtue.
Who Benefits from the Lie?
The first question worth asking is: who gains from this? Certainly not pregnant women, whose already limited choices are narrowed further by suspicion and fear. Certainly not families with autistic children, who are handed a fresh dose of guilt and shame.
The people who benefit are the men who spread the lie. Men like Trump and RFK Jr., who have never known the searing pain of labour, the nausea of pregnancy, or the fear of miscarriage. Men who, cushioned by wealth and privilege, will never face the decision of whether to take paracetamol at 3am because their fever is spiking and they fear for their unborn child. These men sit far away from such realities.
Their project is not to illuminate but to dominate. To remind women that their bodies are not their own, that every decision is suspect, that every choice carries the weight of blame. By declaring paracetamol dangerous, they make women’s pain invisible, illegitimate. They tell women to “tough it out” - but they only say this to women.
The ultimate function of this lie therefore, is power. It is a way to discipline women, to reshape their lives around guilt and self-denial, to push them back into silence and submission. When women are denied even the basic right to manage pain safely, they are easier to corral into the roles Trump and RFK Jr. would prefer: obedient mothers, ‘tradwives,’ and the keepers of a domestic order built on control.
The timing of this is no accident. This claim surfaces at a moment when women’s rights are being rolled back across America: when abortion has already been stripped from millions, when healthcare and education are being gutted, when public trust in institutions is under attack. This is about creating a culture where women’s pain is normalised, their choices delegitimised, their autonomy steadily dismantled.
This lie is one cog in a much larger machine; one that makes homeschooling look like duty, that makes unsafe food and fragile healthcare feel inevitable, that convinces women suffering is noble, and resistance is dangerous. That is the machinery of control we are witnessing, and it is already grinding into motion.
The Machinery of Control
The claim about paracetamol is not an isolated outburst. It plugs neatly into a wider ideological system; one that works to make women doubt themselves, doubt medicine, and even doubt society itself. This is about building a worldview where suffering is expected, and resistance is delegitimised.
“Cuts to education seem less threatening when you are convinced your role is to homeschool your children; a less safe, more expensive food supply seems less problematic when you believe everyone should be growing their own produce and making everything from scratch; defunding the Center for Disease Control does not seem so bad when you have been conditioned to distrust vaccines and believe you can cure a child’s measles with ‘herbal remedies or old food medicine’” (Matei, in The Guardian, 2025).
This is the script. Create distrust, and women will police themselves. Frame pain as “natural,” and women will endure it without complaint. Seed doubt in science, and women will turn to “tradition,” to the kitchen, to the nursery, to the garden. The work of political control is done not only through laws but through the stories that make women mistrust their own choices.
It is a story as old as patriarchy itself. In the nineteenth century, women who voiced distress or resisted male authority were frequently diagnosed with “hysteria” and subjected to the “rest cure” - six to eight weeks of isolation, fatty diet, massage, and strict bed rest, with no intellectual or creative activity permitted (Stiles, 2008; Science Museum, 2019). Charlotte Perkins Gilman, after undergoing the rest cure, found her health collapse and later immortalised its horrors in The Yellow Wallpaper, a text that exposed the treatment not as medicine but as imprisonment (National Library of Medicine, 2010).
In the 1960s, the thalidomide scandal devastated families across Europe. Marketed to pregnant women as a safe remedy for morning sickness, the drug caused thousands of severe birth defects. Yet when the scandal broke, it was mothers who carried the blame - blamed for trusting doctors, for not questioning prescriptions, for taking the drug at all - while pharmaceutical companies evaded responsibility for decades (The Guardian, 2012). Women were left with lifelong guilt for decisions that were never truly theirs.
Go further back still, and the pattern is clearer. Women who held knowledge of herbs, childbirth, and healing were systematically targeted in witchcraft trials across Europe from the 14th to 18th centuries. Midwives and healers like Ursula Kemp in England and Magda Logomer in Croatia were condemned, tortured, and sometimes executed; not because they wielded dark powers, but because their authority threatened the rising dominance of male-controlled institutional medicine (Roper, 1994; Rowlands, 2023). Women’s embodied knowledge was demonised as dangerous; their autonomy over health turned into grounds for persecution.
The lie about paracetamol sits squarely in this tradition. Every cut to public provision is a transfer of labour onto women. Cuts to schools? Mothers must homeschool. Cuts to healthcare? Mothers must become doctors and midwives. Cuts to food safety? Mothers must grow and cook everything from scratch. By making women doubt medicine, doubt institutions, doubt even themselves, the state creates a shadow workforce of unpaid labourers, bound to the home and blamed for every failure.
And the genius of the machinery is that it runs on virtue. They call it “homeschooling,” but it is abandonment by the state. They call it “natural remedies,” but it is the denial of medicine. They call it “toughing it out,” but it is enforced suffering. Each rhetorical trick disguises the same old command: endure, obey, do not resist.
The machinery of control is smooth because it is dressed up as tradition, even morality. But at its core it is a factory of discipline, designed to grind down autonomy and produce obedience. And right now, that factory is running at full tilt.
Autism as Political Football
Autism has become one of the great scapegoats of our age. In the hands of Trump, RFK Jr., and their allies, it is not understood as a neurological difference but as a symbol of decline, tragedy, even conspiracy. Every time these men reach for autism as an explanation - whether linking it to vaccines, paracetamol, or some shadowy plot - they are not speaking about autism at all. They are using it as a weapon.
The strategy is familiar. In our earlier pieces (‘Brain Worms in High Office’ and ‘The Eugenics Revival’), we traced how RFK Jr. has consistently returned to autism as a political tool: a way to stir fear, create enemies, and advance his anti-vaccine crusade. Despite overwhelming scientific consensus that vaccines do not cause autism (Taylor, Swerdfeger and Eslick, 2014), he continues to recycle the claim. And now, alongside Trump, he has found a new scapegoat in paracetamol.
By framing autism as something caused by mothers’ choices, whether taking a vaccine, swallowing a painkiller, or trusting medical advice, blame is shifted directly onto women. Autism becomes a moral judgement, a punishment for bad behaviour, rather than a neurological difference that requires acceptance and support. In doing so, Trump and RFK Jr. not only mislead the public but heap shame and guilt on mothers, fuelling stigma against autistic people and their families.
What makes this so dangerous is that autism is treated as an empty vessel. Into it, political actors pour whatever narrative suits them: the corruption of modern medicine, the dangers of women’s liberation, the decay of social order. Autism is recast not as a lived reality but as a metaphor, a cautionary tale, a bogeyman. This damages public understanding, and corrodes the dignity of autistic people themselves, reducing them to symbols in someone else’s war.
Beneath it all lies a darker logic. If women are reduced to baby-making machines in this worldview, then they had better not litter society with ‘defective’ offspring. This is misogyny, as well as eugenics, disguised as common sense. The demand that women “tough it out” during pregnancy is coupled with the expectation that they will produce children who meet a very narrow standard of normality. If they do not, the blame is theirs alone. It is a worldview rotten to its core, one that resurrects the ugliest eugenic fantasies of the twentieth century and dresses them up as concern for children’s health.
Trump and RFK Jr. have made clear: autism is not something they wish to understand, support, or accommodate. It is something they wish to blame on women, on medicine, and on modernity itself. Within that blame, power is concentrated. Because once autism is cast as a calamity brought on by women’s supposed irresponsibility, every woman’s choice becomes suspect. Every pill, every vaccine, every act of trust in medicine becomes a potential crime.
Autism is the excuse. Control is the mission.
The Tradwife Fascism Behind the Curtain
The lie about paracetamol fits neatly into a broader ideological project: the revival of the ‘traditional wife,’ or tradwife. In this vision, women are celebrated only when they are silent, submissive, and domestic: obedient wives, and tireless mothers who are keepers of the home. Their value lies not in their autonomy or intellect, but in their ability to produce and raise children who conform to a prescribed social order.
As The Guardian has reported, this tradwife revival is not a quirky internet subculture but a deliberate strand of authoritarian politics (The Guardian, 2025). It provides a feminine mask for fascism: floral aprons and sourdough loaves disguising an ideology that seeks to strip women of rights and relegate them to reproductive servitude.
The tradwife fantasy spreads most effectively through aesthetics. On Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, soft-focus reels show unbelievably beautiful women – perfect hair and make-up - in linen dresses kneading dough, tending gardens, homeschooling children at sunlit wooden tables. It looks wholesome, even empowering. But beneath the sepia filter lies a project of submission. The tradwife ideal is not a timeless tradition, but a reactionary invention; a lifestyle designed to seduce women into complicity by making obedience appear as choice.
What this fantasy achieves is a cultural sleight of hand. Baking bread becomes resistance to modernity, homeschooling becomes an act of love, silence becomes virtue. It recasts political rollback as personal preference. Instead of openly declaring that women should be controlled, the tradwife movement convinces women that control is what they wanted all along.
History reminds us that this is nothing new. Fascist regimes have always cloaked authoritarianism in the language of family and tradition. In Nazi Germany, women were honoured only as mothers of “racially pure” children, bound by the slogan Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). Mussolini’s Italy offered medals to women who bore large numbers of children for the state. Franco’s Spain enforced Catholic domesticity, stripping women of civil rights in the name of family unity. Today’s tradwife revival echoes this legacy, swapping propaganda posters for Instagram reels, gingham aprons, and lifestyle blogs. The aesthetic may be softer, but the politics are just as hard.
And in the UK, these narratives are already seeping across the Atlantic. Tradwife influencers with transatlantic followings blur national boundaries; Reform UK’s culture-war messaging finds ready resonance in this vision of “natural” domestic femininity. Talk of “family values,” “common sense,” and “returning to tradition” is already commonplace on the British right. So, the danger is not abstract because is already making its way here.
Why Britain Must Care
It is tempting to dismiss Trump and RFK Jr.’s outbursts as peculiarly American, another sideshow in a circus we watch from across the Atlantic. But Britain has never been immune to imported culture wars. Where MAGA leads, Reform UK follows, desperate not to upset ‘Daddy’ Trump.
The mechanism is the same: start with doubt, feed suspicion, weaponise shame. In the US, it is paracetamol and autism. In Britain, it is debates over sex education, Covid vaccines, abortion, and women’s healthcare. Every time a new conspiracy takes hold in America, an echo soon follows here – just reshaped for British fault lines.
The conditions are ripe. Britain’s NHS maternity services are overstretched, with dozens of units under threat of closure (BBC, 2024). Abortion access, while legal, is increasingly patchy: women in rural areas face weeks of delays or must travel miles to secure treatment (British Pregnancy Advisory Service, 2024). Cuts to education budgets have fuelled resentment against teachers and schools, leaving parents vulnerable to homeschooling narratives lifted straight from the US right.
Meanwhile, Reform UK is positioning itself as Britain’s version of MAGA. Nigel Farage courts Trump with performative loyalty, while his party echoes American talking points on “family values,” “common sense,” and “protecting children.” Already, we see attempts to smuggle tradwife ideology into mainstream conversation: women idealised as homemakers, social care outsourced to mothers, suffering reframed as duty.
The danger is not just rhetorical. The infrastructure of women’s rights in Britain - healthcare, education, childcare - is fragile after more than a decade of austerity. Each imported lie erodes public trust a little further. Each moral panic makes women’s choices that bit smaller. Each echo of MAGA makes it easier for a British politician to say: perhaps women should “tough it out.”
Britain must care because we are not spectators. We are participants, whether we admit it or not. The authoritarian logic does not stop at Dover; it lands in our politics, our schools, our hospitals, our homes.
Conclusion: Feminism Must Rise
Trump and RFK Jr. posture as truth-tellers, but their latest claim about paracetamol and autism exposes them for what they are: pampered men, insulated from reality, who would not recognise a day’s labour - physical, emotional, or domestic - even if it came and tore the gold from their hands. They have never endured the weight of pregnancy, never shouldered the hidden economy of women’s care work, never sat in a maternity ward praying for safety. Yet from their gilded perches, they dare to lecture women about toughness, endurance, or what they must or must not put in their bodies.
These two men embody cowardice disguised as strength. Trump dodged Vietnam on the grounds of bone spurs, then built his life on grievance and excess. RFK Jr. has turned his family name into a platform for conspiracy, selling snake oil dressed as rebellion. Neither man has the moral standing whatsoever to tell women to “tough it out,” nor the intellectual honesty to admit their claims are baseless.
The cruelty, however, is deliberate. These men do not stumble into lies; they craft them to serve a political project. Each falsehood chips away at women’s autonomy, reshapes their choices into guilt, and reframes their suffering as virtue. And while they enjoy the comfort of privilege, it is ordinary women who are told to endure pain, to carry blame, to make themselves small.
We must name this for what it is: an authoritarian project aimed at control. A project that dresses up misogyny as morality, that recycles the darkest eugenic fantasies, and that finds new ways to discipline women under the guise of “tradition.” It is rotten, dangerous, and it must be resisted.
Feminism must rise again to meet this challenge with fire in its belly. We owe no deference to these unworthy, spiteful, pampered men who have never known our labour. We meet them with defiance. We fight because we must: for women’s choices, for women’s dignity, for the right to live without shame imposed from above. Trump and RFK Jr. will not stop at paracetamol. They will not stop until women are stripped of all autonomy.
They demand obedience. They will find rebellion.
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