Opinion|How Moms Got Caught in Trump’s Cross Hairshttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/27/opinion/trump-blame-moms.htmlAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSubscriber-only NewsletterJessica GroseOpinionSept. 27, 2025Credit...Illustration by The New York Times; source photographs by rubberball and dundanim/Getty ImagesLess than six months ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, said, “By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures.”When I heard this, I assumed that the Trump administration would offer a convenient scapegoat for the complicated diagnosis because we already know there are no quick answers to be found. Scientists have been studying the condition for decades, and a single root cause has eluded them. The autism triggers put forward by Kennedy in the past — most notably vaccines — have been thoroughly studied and ruled out.I was surprised that President Trump and the rest of the federal health establishment zeroed in on the association between pregnant women taking Tylenol — a brand name for the drug acetaminophen — and their children developing autism. (I thought they were going to blame antidepressants or the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.) To be clear, the strongest studies on the correlation between Tylenol and autism, which compare siblings, suggest that if there even is a link, it is not causative.In a rambling yet impassioned diatribe on Monday, Trump said: “Taking Tylenol is not good. All right. I’ll say it. It’s not good. For this reason, they are strongly recommending that women limit Tylenol use during pregnancy unless medically necessary. That’s, for instance, in cases of extremely high fever, that you feel you can’t tough it out.”He kept repeating: Pregnant women who are suffering should “tough it out,” as if they aren’t already. Trump expressed similar sentiments in a Truth Social post on Friday: “Pregnant Women, DON’T USE TYLENOL UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY” (all caps, his).This implies that pregnant women are just selfishly and ignorantly popping pills in the first place. The truth is closer to the fact that most pregnant women around the world are afraid of taking medication because they fear birth defects, and they tend to overestimate the risk of common medications and underplay the benefits.Here, Trump is picking up on a historical thread that was popular when he was a child: The idea that thoughtless mothers are somehow to blame for their children’s autism, which has been around nearly as long as the disorder has had a name.Leo Kanner, the doctor whose research led to establishing the first diagnostic criteria for autism in 1943, wrote in his initial paper on the disorder that we must assume “these children have come into the world with innate inability to form the usual, biologically provided affective contact with people, just as other children come into the world with innate physical or intellectual handicaps.”But according to the science writer Edward Dolnick in “Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heydey of Psychoanalysis,” by the end of the 1940s, Kanner had — based on a sample of just 50 additional patients — changed his mind and concluded that the root cause of autism was bad mothering: “Maternal lack of genuine warmth is often conspicuous in the first visit to the clinic. As they come up the stairs, the child trails forlornly behind the mother, who does not bother to look back.”The “refrigerator mother” explanation caught on quickly, picked up by other therapists like Bruno Bettelheim and in the popular press, because of concurrent trends in science and motherhood in postwar America. With the introduction of antibiotics, sanitation and more widely available vaccines in the first half of the century, child and maternal mortality plummeted.These public health victories could have created a society where we put less pressure on individuals but because of 1950s expectations of ideal motherhood — that ever-smiling queen of the spotless kitchen — they provided “fuel for the mother-blaming of the postwar era,” according to Rima D. Apple in her book “Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America.” Apple continued, “Social critics denounced women who stepped out of their traditional role for creating many of the problems of the day such as juvenile delinquency, the decline of the American home, and even child mortality and morbidity.”Though Kanner would later walk back the idea that cold mothering was responsible for autism, the damage had been done. “What could be simpler?” Dolnick asks. “Children who had been driven to autism by their inadequate or neglectful parents could still be reclaimed, and the medicine was no more exotic than a mother’s hug.”A similar, simplistic and even dangerous logic follows here: Just don’t take Tylenol.Beyond refraining from Tylenol use, Kennedy and Trump on Monday offered another simple solution for autism: They were hyping the drug leucovorin and are pushing it through the F.D.A.’s review process, though it does not appear to be a universal silver bullet. According to Matthew Herper of STAT, several small studies have shown that leucovorin — folinic acid — can improve verbal ability of people with autism, but that the effects are not enormous, and small studies are more prone to false positives that may disappear in larger studies. Even Dr. Richard Frye, who “suggested the idea” of leucovorin to federal officials, told The Associated Press, “we were kinda surprised that they were just approving it right out of the gate without more studies or anything.”As is often the case, in the middle of his rambles, Trump says something that is unintentionally revealing. While he was blathering on about pumping babies full of “too much liquid” from 80 vaccines (not true in any way), Trump said, “when you go from all of those, you know, healthy babies to a point where I don’t even know structurally if a country can afford it.”The problem is not, as the president suggests, that we have too many children who have special needs — there will always be people with chronic illnesses and disorders, no matter how much medical progress is made — it’s that we have still not built a society that is structurally equipped to accommodate them in a humane way. And the current administration’s stingy approach to health care is only making the problem worse.It’s far easier to focus on individual mothers, and the unproven promise of miracle drugs, than to create a system that supports us all.Medical freedom for me, but not for thee: A headline in The Tampa Bay Times says it all: “Florida touts doctor freedom but pushes them to take unvaccinated kids.” The reporter, Romy Ellenbogen, explains that when Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that Florida would eliminate all vaccine mandates for school children, he also said that pediatricians shouldn’t be allowed to reject families that won’t vaccinate their children. Highlighting the hypocrisy of that stance, she writes: “Two years ago, DeSantis and the Legislature were adamant about giving doctors the freedom to run their practice as they please. In 2023, the governor signed a bill allowing physicians the ability to deny any patient a treatment if it violates their conscience or morals.”Exile in Guyville: I have been enjoying the documentary about the Lilith Fair music festival, “Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery.” It is a rousing story of female solidarity; the singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan bootstrapped the all-women festival (that ran from 1997 to 1999) at a time when women in rock were belittled by the mainstream. But it’s also kind of depressing me, because watching the many archival clips of unfettered, un-airbrushed creative women from my youth is making me think about the period of aggressive cultural backlash we’re in right now.Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.