Nausea, heartburn, backache, sore boobs, abdominal pain, insomnia, swelling, sweating, breathlessness, dread, the overwhelming urge to eat an entire pineapple at every opportunity: these are just some of the many trials of pregnancy. I also had a strange one where my jaw clicked and throbbed – something, apparently, to do with the hormone that loosens your joints to prepare you for childbirth.
Anyway, before I release my full medical records in the pages of the New Statesman, what I’m trying to say is: pregnancy is really uncomfortable as it is. Add on top of that the flu, or tonsilitis, or some other virus that fires your temperature up, and you really do need something to take the edge off. Ibuprofen isn’t advised in pregnancy in the UK, so your one chance at relief – other than tepid baths and swearing at your partner – is to pop a couple of paracetamol.
But apparently Donald Trump and the wellness right would even like to rob us of that luxury, if the US president’s latest ramblings are anything to go by. In a rather random address from the Oval Office, he declared that Tylenol (the name for paracetamol in America, where people are called things like Tyler) “is no good” and instructed pregnant women to “fight like hell” to only take it if running an extreme fever, and otherwise to “tough it out”.
It seems he was suddenly concerned – so moved, in fact, that he delivered a curtain-raiser for this announcement at Charlie Kirk’s funeral – about a review of scientific studies suggesting a potential association between the active ingredient in the painkiller and autism in some children. Association is not the same as cause, and there is no evidence that Tylenol causes autism.
But it feels to me that there is something deeper going on here, beyond a classic American spasm of autism panic. Just the phrase “tough it out” delivered to pregnant women is so familiar to me – from the weird motherhood influencers who manage to infiltrate my otherwise milquetoast algorithms to midwives and obstetricians in mainstream NHS settings.
As soon as you get pregnant, you are suddenly subjected to “natural” childbirth propaganda, worship of breastfeeding, grave warnings against sleep training, screentime, and eating ultra-processed food. It always seems you’re not doing pregnancy, birth or baby-raising right unless you’re really suffering through it. This is not the preserve of any one ideology or industry; it’s everywhere. It is the air you breathe as you heave your pregnant self around the place.
“As I came close to term I realised that something else had been accreting within me, too: a strange admixture of unexamined moral assumptions about motherhood,” as Lucy Jones wrote in her 2023 book Matrescence. “At the time, I couldn’t fathom exactly where I’d picked up these ideas, but it became clear, once the baby was born, that I felt that self-sacrifice was an essential component of being a good mother.”
I’m not naïve. I knew there would be an element of inevitable suffering involved. But it seems the mother’s sacrifice must encompass an ever-lengthening list these days, mainly drawn up by a wellness-brained American right suspicious of anything that makes women’s lives safer, healthier and easier. Even a little bit of paracetamol. Still, when that was all I was offered when I first went into labour, I was sceptical too…
[Further reading: Ed Davey squares up to Nigel Farage]
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