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Why the Paracetamol–Autism Panic Isn’t About Science: It’s About Control

The Not So Quiet Dehumanisation Of Autistic People

David Gray-Hammond

Jan 17

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There is a familiar rhythm to these headlines. A substance. A pregnancy. A risk. Autism positioned not as a way of being in the world, but as an adverse outcome to be traced, isolated, and ideally prevented. Paracetamol during pregnancy is simply the latest character to wander onto this well-worn stage.

The problem is not that people study medications. Research into safety during pregnancy matters. The problem is what this research is doing culturally, politically, and morally once it escapes the journal and enters public imagination. Because once again, autism is being framed as damage. As contamination. As something so terrible that it must have a cause, a culprit, a moment where everything “went wrong”.

This is not neutral science. It is a story about whose lives are considered acceptable.

Autism, in these narratives, is not treated as a human variation with its own cultures, communities, histories, and futures. It is treated as an error state. A deviation to be avoided. And when you place that framing alongside pregnancy, you get something particularly corrosive; the quiet suggestion that Autistic people are the result of a failure of maternal responsibility.

That move is old. Painfully old. We’ve seen it before with vaccines, with refrigerator mothers, with attachment theories, with stress, with age, with diet. Each wave promises clarity and delivers the same outcome, blame displaced onto parents, especially mothers, and Autistic people reduced to the by-products of bad decisions rather than full human beings.

The paracetamol debate slots neatly into this machinery.

Notice how rarely these discussions ask what Autistic people think. Notice how absent Autistic voices are when our lives are being theorised into preventable outcomes. Notice how easily the conversation jumps from “possible association” to “risk to be avoided”, as if the mere existence of Autistic people requires justification.

That’s not accidental. It reflects a deeper dehumanising logic.

If autism is framed as harm, then preventing autism becomes an unquestioned good. If preventing autism is an unquestioned good, then the lives of Autistic people are quietly reclassified as lives that ideally would not exist. This is how you get from statistical associations to eugenic thinking without ever using the word.

The science doesn’t have to say “Autistic lives are worth less”. The culture fills that gap all by itself.

What gets lost in all of this is the wider ecosystem of distress that Autistic people actually live within. Poverty. Exclusion. Violence. Institutional neglect. Educational trauma. Coercive therapies. A society built around narrow norms of productivity, communication, and compliance. These are central. And yet they are conspicuously absent from prevention-obsessed research narratives.

Because those problems would require social change.

It is far easier to scrutinise a painkiller than to interrogate why Autistic people are denied housing, healthcare, safety, and dignity. It is far easier to medicalise pregnancy than to dismantle systems that punish difference. It is far easier to search for a biochemical villain than to confront a culture that treats disabled people as burdens to be minimised.

So paracetamol becomes a distraction. Not because questions about medication safety are inherently wrong, but because of what this question is standing in for.

“Why are there Autistic people?”

“How could we stop them from existing?”

“How do we make this go away?”

These are the ghosts in the room.

A genuinely humane research agenda would start somewhere very different. It would ask how to reduce suffering without erasing people. How to support Autistic lives rather than prevent them. How to design environments, systems, and relationships that do not grind people down for being different. How to listen to Autistic adults who are already here, already living, already telling you what harms us.

Autism does not need a cure. It does not need a culprit. It does not need to be traced back to a single swallowed tablet so society can absolve itself of responsibility.

What needs addressing is the persistent refusal to recognise Autistic people as fully human.

Until that changes, each new “risk factor” study will keep doing the same quiet work; reinforcing the idea that some kinds of people are mistakes, and that science exists to help us avoid them.

That isn’t progress.

It’s containment dressed up as concern.

Biy David A Coffee

Don’t forget to register for my upcoming course with Kelly Mahler that draws upon my ecosystemic model of distress.