When the US president stood up at the podium and announced a link between autism and paracetamol, he sent alarm through the medical community and the public.
Guardian science correspondent Hannah Devlin speaks to Reged Ahmad about what the science actually says about the painkiller and why experts fear Donald Trump is deliberately fostering a narrative of distrust
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Continue reading...A concern for women’s health is absolutely not at the heart of it – rather, this is yet another way to control women
Donald Trump is a man with no medical training. However, that’s never stopped the very stable genius from inflicting his unhinged health views on the rest of us, has it? Back in 2020, for example, Trump memorably mused that injecting disinfectant could help fight the coronavirus – which forced the maker of Dettol and Lysol to put out an urgent statement explaining that this was a very bad idea.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...The Florence + the Machine singer talks about life after devastating loss, performing with Taylor Swift and the double standards for women in music
After Florence Welch came close to death, she felt strongly that, more than people, she wanted to be with plants and animals. “It was a real need to be around things that couldn’t speak, but had a life force or energy to them. I found that the most healing,” she says. Since then, cats have kept coming to visit her garden. Not her cats – it is hard for her to have pets, what with all the touring – but neighbourhood cats, treating the place as if they live there. “I’m not saying anything, but more and more started coming, and foxes,” she says. She sees patterns and prescience in many things, now. “I don’t know. Or maybe I just noticed them more, because that’s what I needed to be around.”
In August 2023, Welch had a miscarriage. Days later, she learned that the pregnancy had been ectopic, meaning that the fertilised egg had implanted in a fallopian tube, rather than the uterus. The fallopian tube then ruptured, causing massive internal bleeding. “The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death,” she says. “And I felt like I had stepped through this door, and it was just full of women, screaming.”
Continue reading...The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has long been consumed by the neurological condition autism – what causes it, and whether there’s a treatment. This week, Donald Trump took on the cause, making claims about acetaminophen, also known as Tylenol and paracetamol, that were dismissed outright by medical experts around the world.
Jonathan Freedland speaks to Carter Sherman, the reproductive health and justice reporter at Guardian US, about when and why the obsession with autism became political
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Continue reading...Global health agencies and regulators have dismissed unscientific advice from Donald Trump, who made an unproven link between autism and the use of everyday painkillers and vaccines. But the science wasn’t the only problem with that press conference. Matilda Boseley explains what you need to know
Continue reading...Former president says successor’s claims about drug branded Tylenol in US ‘undermines public health that can do harm to women’
Barack Obama has said Donald Trump’s claims linking paracetamol to autism in infants is “violence against the truth” that could harm pregnant women if they were too scared to take pain relief.
Obama, who was being interviewed by David Olusoga at the O2 Arena, told the audience that Trump’s claims about paracetamol – branded as Tylenol in the US – had been “continuously disproved” and posed a danger to public health.
Continue reading...There is no credible evidence linking autism with maternal paracetamol use. But the US president’s ‘tough it out’ message could harm mothers and babies
Kate Womersley is a doctor and academic specialising in psychiatry
On Monday, Donald Trump, flanked by Robert F Kennedy Jr and the former talkshow host and head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Dr Mehmet Oz, announced that women should avoid paracetamol (known as acetaminophen or by the brand name Tylenol in the US) throughout pregnancy because of a spurious link with childhood autism.
This political theatre highlights a longstanding and harmful problem: pregnant women, and their babies, are routinely let down by partial, poor-quality and missing medical evidence. Pregnant women deserve better than irresponsible headlines raising fear based on shaky research that has failed to convince the scientific community.
Kate Womersley is a doctor and academic specialising in psychiatry
Continue reading...US president’s claims around painkiller also known as Tylenol contradict scientific consensus that drug is entirely safe to take
Donald Trump has urged pregnant women not to take acetaminophen, also known as Tylenol or paracetamol. He claimed it raises the chances of children being autistic.
But the US president has been condemned by experts from across the world, who fear he is deliberately fostering a narrative of distrust that could be dangerous for women.
Continue reading...There is no evidence to support the president’s assertions about autism. But they exploit fears that already come with pregnancy
Robert F Kennedy Jr continued his futile search for a single pharmaceutical cause of autism on Monday, when the Trump administration claimed that distorted recent studies and misstated scientific evidence to allege a link between women’s Tylenol use during pregnancy and the development of autism in children. Kennedy has long spoken with disturbing disgust about autistic people, claiming at one press conference that autistic children “destroy families” and “will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date.” He had previously pledged to find the cause of autism by this month.
As part of his apparent quest to eliminate this vast and varied group of people – who do, in fact, pay taxes, hold jobs, play baseball, write poems, go on dates, and function as beloved and caring members of functional families – Kennedy has already sought to restrict access to common vaccines. In June, he fired every member of the advisory committee on immunization practices, an influential group of vaccine experts whose recommendations had long shaped policy for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In place of the experts, he reconstituted the panel with a number of vaccine critics and cranks, whose incompetence has led to chaotic meetings and bizarrely changing vaccine recommendations. Donald Trump has recently joined his health secretary in casting aspersions on childhood vaccines – safe and effective treatments that have saved countless lives and are among the more wonderful miracles of human innovation. “It’s too much liquid,” the president said of the early childhood immunizations on Monday. “Too many different things are going into that baby at too big a number. The size of this thing, when you look at it.”
Continue reading...Health secretary joins medical experts in urging pregnant women to ignore US president’s remarks
Wes Streeting has rejected Donald Trump’s claims of a link between taking paracetamol in pregnancy and autism, urging mothers-to-be to ignore the US president’s remarks.
The health secretary challenged Trump’s statements, which medical experts have stressed are not based on evidence, as part of a drive to reassure mothers-to-be in the UK.
Continue reading...On some level, I realised it was a bit unhinged, writes the author and podcaster Elizabeth Day. But what did I have to lose?
On 29 December 2022, I received a text. ‘Hi mum I’m texting you off a friends phone I’ve smashed mine and their phones about to die, can you WhatsApp my new number x’ I was in a rental car when I got it, my partner at the wheel next to me as we drove down an anonymous stretch of motorway. Both the sky and the road were grey. It was that indeterminate space between Christmas and New Year when the days become sludgy and diffuse; a time when teenagers meet up with their friends to go shopping or gather in each other’s homes and post Snapchats or exchange festive gossip while pretending not to vape. It was the time of waiting – for the next thing to happen, for the promised excitement of New Year’s Eve and snogging underneath leftover mistletoe. So it wasn’t a particularly unusual text to receive, especially not given the trademark adolescent lack of grammar and punctuation.
There was just one thing.
Continue reading...Plus the right to roam the green and pleasant, and a £1,795-a-night solution to the postpartum blues
An all-party parliamentary group is calling for everyone to be given the right to go wild camping and swimming across our green and pleasant land (and, I suppose our blue and hopefully non-besewaged waters). Apparently we only have the right to roam across 8% of England at the moment, a situation that strikes me as so perfectly us that it should be submitted to the Unesco intangible cultural heritage list immediately if not sooner.
Continue reading...We know women give birth during war – and too often, they die. But we must do much more to achieve safety and stability
Jacinda Ardern is a former prime minister of New Zealand
It was usually when my daughter hadn’t slept that the conversation started. I’d message my friend wondering aloud whether I would get through the day without making some glaring mistake. I was the prime minister of New Zealand. Only the second woman in the world to have a baby while leading a country, and some days were hard.
Yet there was one response, a simple text message from my friend, also deep in the trenches of caregiving, that would stop me in my tracks: “Women give birth during war.”
Jacinda Ardern is a former prime minister of New Zealand
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Continue reading...Commons committee finds women’s concerns not taken seriously due to bias, stereotyping and racist assumptions
Black women in England are still facing poorer outcomes in their maternity care due to systemic racism, alongside failures in leadership and data collection, according to a group of MPs.
Across the UK, black women are more than twice as likely to die in childbirth compared with their white counterparts, while babies born to black mothers are at an increased risk of stillbirth.
Continue reading...State forced to stop gathering critical data on pregnancy experiences after Trump administration’s shakeup
The Trump administration’s shakeup of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has forced Mississippi to stop gathering critical data on women’s experiences before, during and after pregnancy – even as the state recently declared a public health emergency over its surging infant mortality rate.
Mississippi has suspended data collection for Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (Prams), a national database that has been integral to policymaking on maternal and infant health for nearly four decades, the Guardian has learned.
Continue reading...Infants in Rx Kids in Flint, Michigan, saw lower rates of prematurity and other issues, saving millions in NICU visits
When Angela Sintery first learned about Rx Kids, a program for new mothers in her home town of Flint, Michigan, she thought someone must be trying to scam her.
“I had some teacher friends that kept sending me links saying: ‘You need to apply for this. It’s a brand-new program. We think you qualify,’” Sintery said. But it seemed too good to be true.
Continue reading...Simply blaming women ignores a range of clinical and societal factors that contribute to the increase in medical intervention during birth, says Dr Debbie Garrod
The rise in the rate of medically assisted births in the UK, particularly caesareans, is laid firmly at the feet of women for being older, larger and having more complex medical problems (Report, 11 September). This ignores a range of clinical and societal factors that contribute. Maternal factors play a part, but so does the rise in defensive clinical practice, the loss of midwives’ and obstetricians’ skills and confidence in supporting physiological birth, and the proliferation of misinformation and scare stories on social media that increase parental anxiety.
All these factors have led us to the current crisis, where more than 50% of babies are born with surgical intervention, with no concomitant improvement in maternal or perinatal mortality and with unknown consequences for the health and wellbeing of future generations.
Dr Debbie Garrod
Midwife and antenatal educator, Abingdon, Oxfordshire
After years of miscarriages, I had abandoned the prospect of giving birth. Then, as we prepared to conceive using a surrogate, the impossible happened
The first time I miscarried, I blamed myself. After getting pregnant early on in our relationship, at 34, I had a flash of doubt that my partner Alex and I weren’t ready to be parents. Then, a few weeks later, the pregnancy was over.
My second early loss, just a few months later, hit me harder. We went to a fertility specialist, and the tests on both of us came back clear, but then I couldn’t get pregnant at all.
Continue reading...Responding to an article by Kathryn Wheeler, readers describe how apps ‘found out’ they were pregnant and fed them worrying posts and targeted advertising
I am so glad to see an article published about the impact of social media on pregnant people and new mothers (‘I felt doomed’: social media guessed I was pregnant – and my feed soon grew horrifying, 3 September). I say “mothers” as I noticed my husband was not subjected to the same algorithms that I was. I, too, found it completely overwhelming when I was pregnant and have come off all social media, as the suggested reels I was barraged with did nothing but create anxiety for me as a new parent.
I decided it was toxic messaging that I didn’t need to be privy to. As there are lots of positive things happening on social media – eg groups connecting you with local new mums – it was a shame to miss out on what could have been happening in my area.
Continue reading...The Victorians called it ‘pernicious vomiting of pregnancy’, but modern medicine has offered no end to the torture of hyperemesis gravidarum – until now.
By Abi Stephenson. Read by Nicolette Chin
Continue reading...Palestine is not a metaphor. And yet – I’ve superimposed every experience of my own mothering these last months on to Palestine
The last time I carried a life, I got to hear her heartbeat exactly three times before it stopped. It was my fifth pregnancy. After the final appointment, the one where the surgeon furrowed her brow as she looked at the ultrasound, I walked down First Avenue. It was winter. It was the year after the pandemic had begun. I was feral with grief. I snapped at strangers, cried in the bodega, etc. I’d spent a year getting pregnant, then unpregnant. I’d wake in the middle of the night and remember: heartbeat, heartbeat. At times, I felt absurd for my grief. I couldn’t ascertain what the metric of a mother was, what goalpost had to be met. Had I met it? Surely grief like this – love like this – had to be more deeply earned?
Three years later, I went under anesthesia again for another egg retrieval. At this point, I had a baby, nearly 18 months old. The surgery was on 6 October. The fertility doctor was cheery at my bedside when I woke; I now had a new crew of eggs on ice. I took a Lyft home. That afternoon, dazed on the couch, I watched sitcoms. The next day, I watched the news break: one urgent report after the other, in English, in Arabic, repeating the same details in different order: surprise attack, dawn, rockets, metal fence bulldozed, hostages taken, raids, combatants, dozens killed, no, hundreds killed, 16-year siege. Then I watched a city go dark. I watched water get cut. I watched the first bombs fall. I watched the mothers.
Continue reading...The algorithm knew I was expecting before I had had a chance to tell my family, friends or GP. At first, I was served up joyful videos. Then the tone became much darker ...
I don’t remember where I was when my TikTok feed showed me a video of a woman holding her stillborn baby, but I remember how I felt. At first, it appeared like any other video of a woman holding a newborn. It was tightly wrapped in blankets while she cradled it in her arms. She was crying, but so are most of the women in these post-birth videos. It wasn’t until I read the caption that I realised what I was looking at. Her baby had been delivered at 23 weeks. I was 22 weeks pregnant. I felt doomed.
My social media algorithms knew I was pregnant before family, friends or my GP. Within 24-hours, they were transforming my feeds. On Instagram and TikTok, I would scroll through videos of women recording themselves as they took pregnancy tests, just as I had done. I “liked”, “saved”, and “shared” the content, feeding the machine, showing it that this is how it could hold my attention, compelling it to send me more. So it did. But it wasn’t long before the joy of those early videos started to transform into something dark.
Continue reading...From free prescriptions and essential vitamins, to statutory maternity pay, a lot of assistance is available
Pregnant women in England are entitled to free NHS prescriptions during pregnancy and for 12 months after giving birth, whether they are employed or not. (In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, they are free for everyone.) You need a maternity exemption certificate, which you can get from a midwife, doctor or health visitor.
Continue reading...