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Why was Donald Trump so fixated on paracetamol in pregnancy, asks Terry Maguire?

In a speech in September 2025, President Trump stated that his administration was linking paracetamol to autism and urging pregnant women to avoid the medicine.

Helpfully for him an American review found that using paracetamol during pregnancy “may” increase children's autism and ADHD risk and urged caution over "especially heavy or prolonged use".

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), following Trump’s statement, issued a letter to clinicians urging them to be cautious about the use of paracetamol in pregnancy, while also saying it was still the only drug approved for treating fevers during pregnancy.

The FDA went on to say that "a causal relationship" between the drug and neurological conditions "has not been established". Hardly a ringing endorsement of the president’s position.

The origin of this policy goes back at least to April 2025 when Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr pledged to find the cause of a steep rise in reported autism cases and would do so in six months with paracetamol and vaccines in his sights.

American claims led to confusion among women

The US advice is largely at odds with most international guidelines including the UK who, in September 2025 stressed that paracetamol remains the safest painkiller available to pregnant women. But the American claims led to confusion among women and concern among healthcare professionals including pharmacists.

On 16^th January this year, the Lancet published an article which looked at forty-three of the best designed and robust studies into paracetamol use during pregnancy. It involved hundreds of thousands of women, particularly comparing pregnancies where the mother had taken the drug to pregnancies where she hadn't.

In this way they could dismiss other factors such as different genes and family environments, that might have an effect.

The research also looked at studies with a low risk of bias and those that followed children for more than five years to check for any link between paracetamol taking and adverse outcomes. The Lancet Review found no association between paracetamol use and an increased risk of autism. 

In a major Swedish Study into a paracetamol/autism link it was noted that confounding factors were not easily removed from smaller studies, and in some poorly designed studies that were not properly controlled for, causing links to be identified and fuelling the current controversy.  

Back in April 2025 the UK Autistic Society (UK AS) challenged Donald Trump and Health Secretary RFK Jr about their claims viewing them as belittling and unhelpful.

Attempting to simplify the condition as “caused” by an environmental agent and that it was a condition that can be “cured” was, in their view, very unhelpful indeed.

They suggested Trump was “peddling the worst myths of recent decades” and that “such dangerous pseudo-science is putting pregnant women and children at risk and devaluing autistic people”. 

There is a link here to Dr Andrew Wakefield, the UK medic who gained considerable notoriety in 1998 when he claimed in a study in the Lancet that the MMR vaccine causes autism.

His paper was later retracted when the data was found fraudulent but the damage was done to public confidence in the MMR vaccine and in spite of being struck off the UK medical register, Wakefield moved to the US where he found a gullible fan-base and had a great influence on Robert Kennedy Jr. Wakefield, according to author John Deer, was strongly supported by parents desperate to prove that their child’s autism was environmental and nothing to do with their genes or parenting.   

Autism diagnoses have increased sharply between 2000 and 2020 in the US and across the First World. This rise is due mainly to increased awareness of the condition and an expanding definition of the disorder making it much easier to get a diagnosis.

Possible risk factors include; parental exposure to pesticides or air pollutions, premature birth or low birth weight, maternal health problems and parents conceiving at older ages.

In the chaos that is current US geo-politics this story will go largely unnoticed but it exemplifies what this president does, taking a complex and controversial problem and applying simple answers which he then, in the absence of any evidence, claims he has solved.  Reassuring for his supporters who see life in binary positions when off course it’s a bit more complicated.

There are opinions based on hard facts and objective truth and there are the opinions of those who hold firmly to shaky, self-serving orthodoxies, bang their fists and demand we accept what they say is true.

Paracetamol’s link to autism is hardly a geopolitical priority, so why is Donald Trump so obsessed with it?  

Terry Maguire is a leading pharmacist based in Northern Ireland.