The news from The Wall Street Journal on Friday that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to announce a link between Tylenol use during pregnancy and autism in children is a return to a regrettable past when autism was routinely blamed on something mothers had or hadn’t done.
More than 80 years ago, autism was blamed on a presumed lack of affection from parents. Later, Kennedy would help whip up public sentiment that autism is caused by vaccines. The science doesn’t show that. It doesn’t show that autism is caused by acetaminophen, either; in fact, scientists and doctors say acetaminophen is safe to take during pregnancy. But Kennedy is reportedly about to argue that the active ingredient in Tylenol, which is also found in other over-the-counter pain medications, is a culprit. The Journal also says Kennedy plans to promote folate as an autism treatment.
Scientists and doctors say acetaminophen is safe to take during pregnancy.
Kennedy continues to sow discord and disinformation about the disability and to characterize autistic people as nothing but burdens. Earlier this year, he maligned us all when he said autism “destroys families” and lamented that “these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job.”
Though NBC News has not confirmed The Journal’s reporting that HHS plans to link Tylenol to autism, Kennedy has said he would make an announcement in September that would identify a cause of autism.
As NBC News reported Friday, “One of the more robust studies to date, published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that taking acetaminophen during pregnancy was not linked to autism, ADHD or intellectual disability.” There initially appeared to be “a very small increased risk” of autism related to acetaminophen, NBC News reported, but “after the researchers compared siblings within the same family — one exposed to the drug during pregnancy, and the other not — they found no link.”
In 2023, a judge ruled against plaintiffs suing Kenvue, Tylenol’s parent company, claiming that the drug caused autism. The judge said the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses failed to support their conclusions with sufficient scientific evidence.
Scientific evidence has always been in short supply from those who are certain they’ve got autism all figured out.
In the first widely read study about autism published in the United States, in 1943, Dr. Leo Kanner, an Austrian American psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University who observed eight autistic boys and three girls, found, “In the whole group, there are very few warmhearted fathers and mothers.” While Kanner cautioned that the children had an “innate inability” to form connections, years later, he described the parents of autistic children as “just happening to defrost enough to produce a child.”
Austrian psychologist Bruno Bettelheim went even further when he said “the precipitating factor in infantile autism is the parent’s wish that his child should not exist.” A survivor of two Nazi concentration camps, Bettelheim compared these purportedly cold parents to Nazi prison guards and recommended “parent-ectomies”; that is, cutting the parents out of the children’s lives.
It would take years to dispel the idea that autism was caused by cold or unwilling parents. Parents such as psychologist Bernard Rimland helped debunk the idea. Ironically, though, Rimland believed vaccines played a role in causing autism. He was at the first congressional hearing that featured a conversation about autism and vaccines with Andrew Wakefield, the physician who would later lose his medical license for putting out the faulty study connecting autism and the MMR vaccine. During that first hearing, members of Congress and witnesses said they were grateful that Rimland had helped relegate the “refrigerator mothers” trope to the dustbin.
Most of the discussions about the causes of autism have either directly or indirectly blamed parents.
Even so, most of the discussions about the causes of autism have either directly or indirectly blamed parents. For example, when I was writing my first book, I met and interviewed one autistic person whose parents blamed themselves for getting their children vaccinated. Another person’s parents had a child who started showing autistic traits, so they delayed vaccinating a younger child for as long as they could.
Indeed, the big problem with assigning blame to vaccines, Tylenol or cold, unloving mothers is that when we’re having discussions about blame, we’re not having discussions about the best way to support autistic people.
My fear is that the next generation of autistic Americans will be incalculably worse off than previous generations. While in the past, many were searching around in the dark grasping for ideas and better understanding around autism, this time, the federal government will be blaring disinformation with the biggest megaphones, and instead of fighting for their kids, scores of parents will self-flagellate and kick themselves. And we will all be poorer for it.
