After the Trump administration announcement suggesting acetaminophen use during pregnancy might cause autism, I felt angry and honestly tired of being misunderstood and blamed once again as a woman, as a mother, as a mother of an autistic daughter and as someone who is proudly autistic.
Angry that this ‘research’ – one that many experts have publicly criticised, is once more rising to fame and promoting fake news.
But what angers and saddens me the most is thinking about all the mothers out there wondering: “Did I cause my child’s autism by taking an over-the-counter medicine deemed safe for pregnancy to calm my fever or so common discomfort during my pregnancy?”
We’re witnessing a dangerous pattern of harmful claims labelling the natural variability that comes with being human as maternal “failures”. These claims also increasingly frame autism as a tragedy to prevent or fix rather than a natural variation to support.
I wrote earlier this year about how dangerous rhetoric about autism is the real family breaker, not autism. Because here’s what leaders propagating these toxic claims won’t tell you: billions of dollars have been spent searching for autism’s “cause,” and every single theory has targeted – surprise, surprise – mothers
And all have ignored the fundamental truth: autism isn’t something that needs fixing.
While it takes years for families to access the right support after an autism diagnosis, leaders rush to promote unproven theories that shame the very people whom the system is disabling.
Women reading this, neurotypical and neurodivergent alike, deserve better than guilt. We deserve facts, support, and recognition that our children aren’t broken.
Pain relief isn’t sushi!
I’m an autistic mother raising an autistic daughter. And I’m someone who has never hesitated to use pain relief when needed because healthcare is a right, not something to be ashamed of.
When the paracetamol story broke, despite knowing the research behind it is absurd and has been refuted by the vast majority of the scientific and healthcare community, I still found myself thinking back to every headache, every fever, every time I took pain relief during my pregnancy.
Like countless mothers, I had been careful: no alcohol, limited caffeine, religiously taking prenatal vitamins. But pain relief isn’t sushi! It is not a luxury or even a choice; it is basic healthcare. Be it for chronic conditions requiring management, for fevers that could be dangerous for both mother and baby, or for the basic human need to function while growing another human being without being in pain: pregnancy-safe pain relief is the right and safest choice.
The research on acetaminophen and autism shows correlation, not causation, and fails to account for crucial factors like genetic predisposition or the reality that autistic parents often have autistic children. The genetic reality is far more compelling than any pharmaceutical theory; yet, this fundamental factor is consistently ignored in studies that prefer mother-blame narratives.
I know all of this. And yet I still felt the guilt build in my core. This guilt is the absurdity of our cultural obsession with finding someone to blame for autism – and preferably the mother.
A century of blaming mothers
This pattern isn’t new. Since the 1940s, autism research has systematically targeted mothers with debunked theories. Leo Kanner’s “refrigerator mothers” theory, first introduced in his landmark 1943 paper “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact” and further developed in 1949, suggested that emotionally cold parenting by mothers who were like “emotional refrigerators” caused autism.
In the 1950s, John Bowlby’s attachment theory work, including his influential 1951 monograph “Maternal Care and Mental Health” for the World Health Organisation, was misapplied to suggest that poor maternal attachment caused autism. More recent decades have seen claims linking parental weight to autism risk, each theory promising answers while delivering shame. Clinical Psychologist,Marie Camin, did a great Instagram post about this if you want to go deeper.
Each has been thoroughly debunked, yet here we are again with Tylenol, because blaming mothers is easier than building inclusive systems.
What I’ve learned through years of supporting families is that the cruellest irony of autism “cause” research is how it weaponises maternal love.
Every new theory whispers the same toxic message: “You could have prevented this if you’d just…” Except autism isn’t something to prevent. It’s neurodiversity that, with proper support, brings unique strengths to our communities.
I’m left-handed. So what did my mother do wrong?
The most dangerous misconception perpetuated by these recurring “autism cause” claims and “research” is that autism itself requires prevention. This framing ignores decades of neurodiversity research showing that autism, ADHD, and similar conditions represent natural variations in human cognition differences that, with appropriate support, contribute valuable perspectives to our communities.
Consider this parallel: I’m left-handed, a trait that generations ago would have marked me as defective, forcing teachers to tie my dominant hand behind my back to “correct” this dangerous deviation. Today, we recognise left-handedness as a natural human variation.
And when we stopped punishing and ostracising children for being who they were genetically, the rate of left-handedness among populations increased dramatically from about 1880 to 2000 simply because we stopped forcing children to use their “wrong” hand.
Yet we still fail to apply the same logic to autism.
So to every mother of a neurodivergent child reading this: you have done nothing wrong. You didn’t fail, you didn’t cause harm, and your child is not broken.
Autism awareness has increased not because of environmental causes, but because we’ve stopped ignoring and misdiagnosing autistic people, particularly girls, nonbinary people, and women.
The autistic community has been under relentless attack in recent months. From political rhetoric framing autism as a pandemic that breaks families, to removing those with less support needs from NDIS, to renewed vaccine misinformation, and now pharmaceutical blame-shifting, each wave of stigma makes life harder for autistic people already struggling to access support, employment, and acceptance.
After decades of debunked theories targeting everything from “cold mothers” to vaccines to parental weight, it’s time to acknowledge that this research agenda has always been motivated by eugenics rather than genuine care for families.
The billions spent searching for autism’s “cause” could have funded teacher training, early intervention programmes, and family support systems like Understanding Zoe that actually improve lives.
Right now, the autistic community needs advocates and genuine allies who speak up and question research that targets mothers while ignoring genetics, help support inclusive policies in schools and workplaces, and amplify autistic voices instead of fear-based speculation. People ready to invest in making our world more accessible for the autistic people who exist and deserve dignity, support, and acceptance. What my daughter and I, and more broadly the autistic community, require are understanding, respect and sensory accommodations. Not a cure!