The Misogyny of MAHA and the Politics of Health

Wrapped up in the near-incoherent warning against the use of paracetamol (Tylenol/acetaminophen) in pregnancy reveals the real story of the Make America Healthy Again project: misogyny dressed up as health advice.

This is a broader project of bad science weaponised to undermine trust and weaken the very institutions that exist to support health and wellbeing.

Let's start with the evidence: while there has been more than a decade of concern about possible associations between paracetamol use in pregnancy and neurodevelopment consequences in children, particularly ADHD and autism spectrum disorder, the best and most recent evidence is reassuring:

"Acetaminophen use during pregnancy was not associated with children's risk of autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability in sibling control analysis." – Ahlqvist et al. 2024

Science as a punching bag

Despite this, we are treated to the absurd spectacle of a brain-wormed conspiracy peddler teaming up with a carnival barker unable to even pronounce acetaminophen. Together they issue sweeping advice in direct opposition to medical organisations across the world reaffirming the safety of appropriate paracetamol use in pregnancy.

What's revealing is not the bad science itself, but who bears the consequences of these pronouncements: this is not primarily about paracetamol. It’s about a particularly regressive worldview.

“If you’re telling parents or telling society that someone should be doing this work of keeping kids safe, what you’re really saying is women should be doing this work, especially mothers. ... RFK Jr is weaponizing the supermom myth – the false idea that moms are the only ones who can keep kids safe from harm.” – Prof. Jessica Calarco (2025)

Wrapped up together with the just-asking-questions bad faith anti-vax arguments, the distracting focus on food-dyes, fructose and food-purity1, and now the "just tough it out" advice for pregnant women with pain and fever, is exposure of this movement's misogyny. The weight of navigating decisions on food, vaccines and now, paracetamol, falls disproportionately on women, and the consequences of making the wrong decision will be to be judged by MAHA as a bad mother.2 Women bear all the responsibility and blame, but get little help and support.

The burden falls on women

The rhetoric is always the same: choices, responsibility, discipline. Pregnant women are told to carry the moral weight of every decision, bearing responsibility without support, risk without remedy, and blame without resources. The politics of American healthcare is quick to blame, slow to protect.

Condemning parents for childhood nutritional shortfalls while slashing $1 billion in funding for programs bringing fresh fruits and vegetables to schools and food banks; limiting vaccine access while fanning the flames of measles outbreaks; limiting reproductive health access while doing nothing for US maternal mortality rates more than double other wealthy countries; providing no mandated maternity leave (the only high-income country without such protection) or ready access to affordable childcare; and repeatedly refusing to address the scourge of childhood exposure to gun violence, are all unforgivable moral failings. Advising pregnant women to avoid paracetamol while offering no alternative is more of the same.

Misogyny, medicine, and power

The logic here is not accidental. By shifting responsibility onto the individual while dismantling institutions that help, MAHA’s ideology performs a double trick: it leaves people unsupported, and then discredits those institutions – medical, public health, government – that would normally step in.3 The state fails, blames the individual, and then demands more power. The moralistic thread tying these ideologies together both ignores the importance of institutions in addressing these issues, and then further disempowers them.

Anesthesiologists and other clinicians must defend access to safe and effective pain relief, a basic human right. Paracetamol is cheap, effective, and globally accessible. Pretending otherwise is not just bad science, it’s political theatre designed to keep women in pain, institutions weakened, and power concentrated. Beyond the drug, the real fight is recognising when science is being twisted to advance ideological goals, when those goals reinforce sexism and inequity, and then weaponise this sexism to hollow out the very institutions that sustain public health.

The misogyny of MAHA is not an accident. It’s the point.

  1. Yes, some food dyes are harmful and yes, high-fructose corn syrup has helped fuel the obesity epidemic. But this simplistic, reductionist thinking ignores the many real social, cultural, economic and political causes of America's abysmal health outcomes. Switching Coke to cane sugar and using natural dye in Froot Loops is branding, not public health policy. ↩

  2. Don't get me started on this essentialist obsession with the primary role of women in society, reducing them to wombs, caregivers, and homemakers, with little value beyond reproduction. Fifty percent of the population written off as support staff... ↩

  3. Institutions are undermined in two ways: directly, through defunding, contradiction, and performative attacks; and indirectly, by corroding the very idea of expertise. When public figures spew bad science, it doesn’t just damage trust in them—it erodes trust in any medical authority. That’s the point: if no one believes experts, institutions themselves lose their power. ↩