First they came for the paracetamol – will epidurals and caesareans be next?

In a typically incoherent rant, he repeatedly told expectant mothers not to take Tylenol – the brand name by which most Americans know paracetamol – because it was associated with a “very increased risk of autism”. It must be clearly stated: there is no strong evidence for this.

Trump said pregnant women should “tough it out” and that there was “no downside in not taking it”, “ absolutely no harm” – revealing plainly what he thinks about women and pain.

We learned that he has “always had strong feelings about autism and how it happened and where it came from”. Well, phew!

Actual scientists, doctors and international health agencies – including the NHS and the WHO – criticised the airing of these “strong feelings” and pointed out that the highest quality evidence found no association between paracetamol and autism, reassuring people that taking paracetamol during pregnancy is safe. Even right-wing media seemed uneasy about this latest belch of pseudoscience.

But even though Trump’s comments were typically asinine, from a person who clearly doesn’t understand science, causation, biology, or bleach, the delivery of misinformation will cause harm. We live under Foucault’s governmentality, after all. Pregnancy can be a state of anxiety, with a heightened vigilance to protect the growing baby. Even if you think Trump is an idiot, you might be unsure. The Food and Drug Administration are changing the labels? Aren’t they legit?

Health professionals have rushed to mediate some of this damage by advising pregnant women that having a fever in pregnancy can actually be harmful – a fever that paracetamol can reduce. Pain – “toughing it out” – can also trigger stress responses.

Beneath the buffoonery, the hysterical press conferences, the naked politicking, is real-world barbarism, and this is just the latest baleful chapter.

Trump proudly “killed” Roe v Wade, removing women’s constitutional right to abortion in 2022, and since then, women living in states where abortion is banned – including in cases of incest and rape – are more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth.

The widespread cuts to National Institutes of Health (NIH) science and research grants will prevent scientists from working in areas that are sorely needed, such as perinatal mental health, women’s health and improving racial inequalities.

Since writing Matrescence, a book about becoming a mother, I’ve heard from many people raising children in different countries. While the social support and maternity care we have in the UK is shameful, my impression from these correspondences is that the hardest place to become a mother in the west is probably the US, with its lack of paid parental leave, healthcare inequalities and lack of social support. The average cost of having a baby in the US is around $19,000 and any kind of complication can raise that cost enormously.

Indeed, a large study published in JAMA Internal Medicine showed that maternal mental health in the US had declined significantly between 2016 and 2023.

Pregnant women, new mothers, are already under stress, and this announcement won’t help. But perhaps that is the point.

Trump’s narrative intersects with the renaissance of conservative ideas about how women should be and behave, and what they should tolerate, often based on a fantasy of an evolutionary past, a tradwife in the kitchen milking a cow, living under white, male supremacy, led by an autocrat. This idea rests on a myth of what is “natural”, ignoring that “nature” sometimes means death in childbirth, and deadly diseases, such as measles and whooping cough.

His comments about women enduring pain, and blaming mothers for the perceived “crisis” of autism, maps on to centuries of misogyny and the positioning of women as reproductive vessels, decorative objects, servants, little else.

From the theory of “maternal imagination”, when physicians believed that pregnant women could change the growing foetus with their minds and thus congenital disorders were the fault of the mother, to Bruno Bettelheim’s “refrigerator mother” rubbish, which punishingly blamed “cold” mothers for giving their children autism, to Grantly Dick-Read’s bizarre ideas that pain in childbirth was the fault of the “civilised” woman, men saying stupid stuff based on their “feelings” is dangerous.

The pushback this week is at least heartening. And we should all be alert. Because if they are coming for our paracetamol, what’s next? Epidurals? Gas and air? caesarean sections?

Telling women to “tough it out” and compelling women to motherhood is only possible in a world where those in power are catastrophically ignorant – and deeply, cruelly indifferent to the health, dignity and survival of women.

Lucy Jones is the author of Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

Photograph by Getty Images