Journalist and blogger Amanda Marcotte laid into Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Monday in an op-ed over what she described as his “special vendetta against the bodily autonomy of women, especially pregnant women,” and compared his rhetoric to that of “rape apologists.”
RFK Jr. has faced renewed scrutiny after his conference last week alongside President Donald Trump, in which he linked autism to the use of Tylenol by pregnant women, a claim that experts say is not supported by existing data. At the event, Trump recommended that pregnant women “tough it out” rather than use Tylenol, among the few over-the-counter pain relievers scientists have said are safe for them.
But for Marcotte, Kennedy's long-running fixation on identifying a culprit for the rising rates of autism in the United States is less out of concern and more a means to an end — one that Marcotte argues is strictly about “controlling women.”
“Kennedy still offered the most vile comment during the event, when he appeared to casually mock victims of sexual abuse: ‘some of our friends like to say we should believe all women,’ he said, before insisting that the ‘friends’ he mentioned must be hypocrites because they don’t believe women who falsely claim vaccines cause autism,” Marcotte wrote.
“Kennedy, of course, was referencing the slogan ‘believe women,’ which advocates for victims of sexual violence crafted to reflect the studies that show over 90% of rape allegations are true. ‘Believe all women,’ in contrast, is a sarcastic phrase typically deployed by rape apologists to falsely suggest that feminists want men to be imprisoned without evidence.”
Both RFK Jr. and Trump have doubled down on their assertion that Tylenol use among pregnant mothers was directly linked to an increased chance of autism, with Trump declaring on social media, in all caps, that under no circumstance should a pregnant mother use Tylenol “UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY,” and that mothers should never give their children the drug “FOR VIRTUALLY ANY REASON.”
At best, the link between autism and Tylenol is inconclusive, with perhaps the largest study on the correlation – which used data from 2.5 million children over a period of 24 years – finding only a .09% increase in autism rates among pregnant mothers who used Tylenol. However, the study did not control for a range of factors, potentially leading the small difference to be contributory to secondary factors, such as mothers in poorer health more frequently using pain medication.
"Feminists have never used the phrase ‘believe all women,’ which is a misogynist insult. In Kennedy’s mouth, it became even more sinister – and not just because he was accused of sexual assault by a family babysitter in the 1990s,” Marcotte wrote.
“The secretary was attempting to frame his attacks on children’s health care as if they were a crusade for women’s rights. Instead, he insulted women’s intelligence by suggesting that a rape victim talking about her own experiences deserves no more respect than former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy claiming to have superior medical knowledge than actual doctors.”