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Where do babies come from? Robert F Kennedy Jr doesn’t seem to know | Arwa Mahdawi

Robert F Kennedy Jr is the father of six children. He’s also the US health secretary. Two facts that might lead a reasonable person to assume he possesses a basic understanding of how foetuses develop.

In a shocking development, however, it seems that Kennedy – an anti-vaxxer who says his brain was partly eaten by a parasitic worm – may not know what he’s talking about. During a cabinet meeting last Thursday, Kennedy reasserted unproven claims that taking the common painkiller acetaminophen, also known as Tylenol or paracetamol, while pregnant causes autism. Doubters of this theory, he said, were motivated by Trump derangement syndrome. To underscore his point, he referenced a TikTok video he’d seen of a pregnant woman “gobbling Tylenol with her baby in her placenta”.

Foetuses, of course, develop in the uterus, not the placenta. It’s possible, if we are being generous, that Kennedy misspoke. Then again, he would hardly be the first US politician to make it clear he knows nothing about the female bodies he is so keen to legislate, would he?

In 2019, for example, 25 Republicans – all white men – voted for a near-total ban on abortion in Alabama. During the debate, Clyde Chambliss, one of the bill’s sponsors in the Senate, noted that while he didn’t have medical training, “from what I’ve read, what I’ve been told, there’s some period of time before you can know that a woman is pregnant … It takes some time for all those chromosomes and all that.” Chambliss went on to say the generous bill allowed a woman to end her pregnancy “up until the point she is known to be pregnant”. Yeah, I don’t know what he means either.

Then there’s the Ohio Republican John Becker, who once co-sponsored a bill prohibiting insurers from covering abortion services, except for a procedure “intended to reimplant” an ectopic pregnancy in a woman’s uterus. This is medically impossible. After this was pointed out, Becker said he’d never actually researched the issue.

And there’s the Idaho lawmaker who once asked if a woman could swallow a small camera so doctors could conduct a remote gynaecological exam. No, he was told by a doctor, because swallowed pills don’t end up in your vagina. “Fascinating,” he replied.

I could go on; I’m afraid there are endless examples. But I’ll end with the late Todd Akin, a conservative Missouri Republican, who said in 2012 that “legitimate rape” rarely results in pregnancy because “the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down”. Yep, that same crafty female body that grows babies in its placenta.

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