Trump’s Tylenol-and-autism speech will have serious consequences. I should know.

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The Trump administration’s announcement last week linking the use of acetaminophen by pregnant women to their children’s autism was (as many have by now argued ) alarmist, unsupported, and irresponsible. To appreciate the depths of the harm the idea could cause, we need to understand the saga of mother blame in the story of autism. One of the most pernicious myths in this history was the mid-20 th -century idea that “refrigerator mothers”—cold, intellectual, working mothers—caused their children’s autism. Historians who study this period, including me, wonder whether the refrigerator mother is now being reincarnated as the Tylenol mother.

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