The Tylenol-Pregnancy Panic Could Be an Early Warning Sign

9.23.25

Click to skip ahead: In the Courts, Louisiana is invoking the Comstock Act to join the federal mifepristone lawsuit. In Censoring Abortion, more details on the online censorship of abortion. In Attacks on Birth Control, Trump’s tariffs could push BC pills out of reach. In Stats & Studies, how online birth control disinfo could be affecting people’s experiences of side effects. In the Nation, a new avenue through which pregnant women could be surveilled and punished. And under 40 Days for Life Watch, the nation’s biggest, most militant anti-abortion protest is officially under way.

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In the Courts

Last month, Texas and Florida asked to join an ongoing federal lawsuit against the FDA calling for the restoration of dated, medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone. Now Louisiana has followed suit, also asking to join. Autonomy News notes that in the state’s request, Louisiana specifically cites the Comstock Act, invoking the 1873 law that bans the mailing of any ‘obscene’ materials to stop the mailing of abortion pills. Remember the days when conservatives tried to call us crazy for ever bringing up Comstock???

Within its own borders, Louisiana has been one of the strictest states in the nation on abortion pills. Last year, it became the first state to classify the pills as a controlled substance—sowing chaos in maternity wards, where the medication is used to stop women’s hemorrhaging. (Doctors even had to run timed drills to see how long it would take them to get from the locked-up medication to their bleeding patient.)

Now, the state is trying to extradite a New York doctor for allegedly mailing pills into the state, accusing Dr. Margaret Carpenter of drug dealing and ‘coercion.’ So, of course Louisiana wants a piece of this mifepristone lawsuit—and of course they’re invoking Comstock.

As a refresher, this suit has been all over the place. Abortion, Every Day broke the news about its revival in 2024: attorneys general from Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho sought to ban the shipping of abortion medication, ban minors from using the drug, and restore pre-2016 rules that would limit how far into pregnancy the medication could be used and who could prescribe it.

Unsurprisingly, the suit is also chock full of misinformation and scare tactics—like claiming abortion medication “starves the baby to death in the womb.” You can read all the details in our explainer below:

The GOP's Attack on Abortion Pills is Here

Earlier this year, the Trump DOJ determined that the attorneys general of the three states didn’t have standing to challenge the FDA in a Texas court. (Not because the administration was defending mifepristone at all, but because they had their own legal strategy.)

But now, Texas is among the states requesting to join the suit; and if far-right federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk agrees, the DOJ may no longer be able to dismiss the suit on standing grounds. That could launch the issue straight to SCOTUS.

Time really is a flat, nauseating circle.

Meanwhile, as if giving us Brett Kavanaugh weren’t enough, former Justice Anthony Kennedy is now forcing his memoir on all of us. Excerpts obtained by USA Today show that, according to Kennedy, he almost stepped down… because he just couldn’t bear the idea of ruling that women should have rights:

“Because of my ever-constant belief that life must be protected from the moment of conception, I struggled with the idea that the Constitution should allow some choice to end a pregnancy. The struggle led me to wonder whether it would be wrong for me, morally, to stay on the Court if doing so would require me to rule under the law that women have the right to end a pregnancy.”

The arrogance of thinking that any of us still care—or ever cared—about Kennedy’s personal opinions on whether the government should be able to force us to give birth, is astounding and borderline delusional.

Censoring Abortion

Social media censorship has been a massive ongoing challenge for reproductive rights activists. Even Abortion, Every Day’s TikToks are constantly being flagged, shadow-banned, and taken down for no real reason—this happened just a few days ago! So, abortion censorship and anti-abortion activists’ closeness to big tech is always front-of-mind for us at AED.

Just last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched their Stop Censoring Abortion campaign to identify platforms doing just that, and to flag misused policies targeting abortion pill information—like blocking users for “trying to sell drugs.”

Today, EFF has a new write-up digging into why credible abortion info is censored while extremist anti-abortion content trends.

A majority of creators and nonprofits who share content about reproductive health, general sex ed—and even issues like preventing gender-based violence—report that their posts have been taken down and flagged for violations. Meanwhile, the Center for Intimacy Justice reports that extreme content—promoting hate or displaying excessive gore, for instance—often thrives on these same platforms.

EFF also notes that abortion-related content isn’t just being wrongly taken down—it’s also vulnerable to shadowbanning, which occurs when posts are allowed but are deprioritized by the algorithm. (While Meta has admitted to “ranking” content, little is known about this ranking system.)

What we’re keeping a close eye on: the fact that abortion censorship isn’t just coming from private companies. States like Texas and South Carolina have recently introduced bills to stop internet providers from platforming pro-choice groups and information on abortion pills. The federal Kids Online Safety Act bill in Congress, too, would open the door for GOP states to potentially block abortion-related websites.

It’s obvious why abortion censorship is such a priority for conservatives. Knowledge—certainly, knowledge about how to order abortion pills online—is power. And they want to keep us as powerless as possible.

To find out where you can get abortion medication, check out our Resources section.

Attacks on Birth Control

Republicans have been escalating their years-long war on birth control on all fronts lately—whether it’s voting against legislation to enshrine a right to birth control, working to repeal protective legislation, or allowing healthcare providers and pharmacists to deny women contraception. That’s to say nothing of the Trump administration straight up calling birth control ‘abortion’ and burning it.

So, it’s hardly surprising that Trump’s disastrous, proposed tariffs could be especially dangerous for birth control. This week, the administration threatened to slap tariffs as high as 250% on pharmaceutical imports: Bloomberg notes that in 2024, approximately 65% of all birth control pill prescriptions in the U.S. were manufactured by two India-based companies.

That means at a time when Republicans are eagerly kicking anyone they can off health insurance and defunding Planned Parenthood, the most affordable forms of birth control pills could become even less accessible.

Obviously, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single item unscathed by the sheer stupidity and chaos of Trump’s proposed tariffs. But the impact on low-cost birth control pills hardly seems accidental, given this administration’s positions on… everything.

As AED has written so many times before, Republicans don’t need to pass a law banning birth control—they just need to make it impossible to get.

Stats & Studies

Speaking of the war on birth control: conservatives’ attacks on contraception have infiltrated even seemingly apolitical online spaces catered to women. We’ve watched as popular influencers increasingly push ‘natural birth control’ methods, or spread disinformation about hormonal contraception. Now, a new study shows that our experiences of side effects from birth control pills could be shaped by our “beliefs and expectations” about the pill.

To be clear: All bodies are different, and individual experiences with different forms of birth control will be different too. But this study suggests that women’s experiences with birth control could be shaped by the disinformation and stigma they’re encountering online or in their communities.

Published in the UK University of Sheffield’s Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, the study notes that up to 60% of users stop taking birth control pills within two years due to side effects. Side effects often include mood changes, fatigue, nausea, acne and breast tenderness. But these descriptors are fairly nebulous, the study notes, which suggests that some experiences may be “psychological in origin.”

A press release for the study says:

“Factors such as anxiety, prior beliefs about medicines and negative information circulating on social media can amplify how symptoms are experienced.”

And there’s certainly a lot of that: all too often, influencers have wielded women’s negative personal experiences with contraception—or their difficulty navigating this country’s undeniably fucked medical system—to radicalize young women against birth control. In fact, there’s been so much disinformation about contraception in recent years that TikTok had to impose special content moderation standards on the subject.

It’s all about manufacturing consent for us to eventually be okay with losing the right to contraception itself.

In the Nation

So, you’re probably hearing a lot about Tylenol and autism right now. Spoiler alert: Like everything else from this administration, it’s bullshit. Do what you can to tune out the noise and listen to actual health experts.

At a Monday news briefing, President Trump declared:

“If you’re pregnant, don’t take Tylenol. When you have your baby, don’t give your baby Tylenol at all unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

Why? Because Trump and RFK Jr. are convinced that pregnant women who take Tylenol will give autism to their unborn babies. For good measure, Trump then assured us that so long as we listen to him, “Nothing bad can happen. It can only good happen. [sic]” Cool. Thanks!

For all the memes that have sprung from this wildly ableist nonsense, I haven’t seen anyone else raise this, so I will: Pregnant women are already hyper-policed for their behaviors and consumption during pregnancy. Nonconsensual drug testing is rampant, and has resulted in several women being flagged and punished by state agencies for eating poppyseeds and testing positive for drug use.

Even if right now it’s just a ‘guidance’ that pregnant women avoid Tylenol, we have to be wary—because the reproductive police state is unrelenting, and this could present another inevitable avenue through which pregnant people are surveilled and punished. Jessica dug into this a bit today in a video:

jessicavalenti

A post shared by @jessicavalenti

Trump also addressed the UN General Assembly today to boast about his utterly draconian human rights record. The bulk of his remarks took aim at the UN’s effectiveness; he even threatened the countries of the world, telling them they’re “in trouble” with him back in power.

On that note, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talked to the New York Times on Monday about the global rollback of reproductive rights, especially in the U.S. Clinton called Trump’s attacks “un-American,” as he’s “on a mission to undo the 250-year-old experiment of creating a country based on the idea that we are all created equal.” She also noted that some of us certainly saw this coming:

“Voters, citizens, are now seeing the danger that is being posed. It did obviously take a while, and some people were more prescient than others, but I think now the danger is widely seen and understood.”

We certainly hope so!

40 Days for Life Watch

Aaaand 40 Days for Life—the most militant, disruptive, nationwide annual anti-abortion protest—is in full swing. Even with the, err, ‘rapture’ supposedly right around the corner, dozens of anti-abortion freaks in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, apparently had nothing better to do on a Monday evening than effectively storm the state Capitol and rally to roll back abortion rights.

40 Days for Life traditionally entails camping out in front of abortion clinics, harassing and potentially assaulting clinic staff and patients. But with crucial judicial races in the state this November, anti-abortion activists wielded this launch event as something like a political rally—hence, staging it at the Capitol.

There’s a long, dark history of violence propagated by 40 Days for Life. And, again: This is the first 40 Days for Life since Trump in January pardoned two dozen extremists convicted of violating the FACE Act. Around the same time, Vice President JD Vance also told the March for Life that anyone who attacks clinics will “never have the government go after them ever again.” Encouraging!

So, we repeat: Stay safe, keep your eyes peeled, flag anything you may find notable in your community to tips@abortioneveryday.com—and show some extra love to your local abortion providers, of course.