RFK Jr.'s MAHA Plan: The Group Most Affected

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Let’s get this out of the way first: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not going to be successful at his stated MAHA goal. You can’t make America healthier—I refuse to even say “again” when we weren’t healthy before—while you are simultaneously so drastically slashing budgets for scientific research. You also can’t make America healthier while ignoring any expert who is not a crackpot—and so very much data—on the basics of vaccines. More minimally, you can’t make America healthier while claiming that, say, seed oils are the devil (seed oils are innocent). So the question isn’t whether RFK Jr. will make America healthier. On balance, he will only be a disaster for American health. (Sure, he will occasionally get things right—this fact brings to mind the saying about broken clocks, and the one about a monkey at a typewriter and Hamlet.) But what will he actually do? Well, to be sure, he will make life worse—and shorter—for lots of groups of people. But as a person who recently gave birth to a baby and spent months watching and reading the news from maternity leave, my answer to that question is: RFK Jr. is waging a war on women. Let’s go through some of the ways. Kennedy is encouraging women to breastfeed, to provide their babies with, as he puts it, “the infant formula that God made, the infant formula in a mother’s breast.” (Would that not be the infant formula that the woman made, with her own body? I digress.) While increasing breastfeeding rates is a goal shared by many legitimate public health experts (see: broken clock), the biological advantages of breastfeeding are somewhat limited, making this a strange enterprise for a government official. But more to the point, the costs of breastfeeding, particularly exclusively breastfeeding with no supplement from formula, are huge. For women. Namely, breastfeeding is very time-consuming, even in the best of circumstances. (In the worst, it can involve women working on the project of feeding their infant at great expense to their own well-being.) Formula—real, store-bought formula—is, except in freak cases of contamination, a perfectly safe and good option for getting babies fed, right now. Nonetheless, Kennedy has, along with his weird breastfeeding comments, simultaneously widely publicized a project “to make sure infant formula products are safe and wholesome.” What Kennedy really stands to do here is scare women away from a method of nourishing their babies that is perfectly acceptable, that is healthy, and that stands to make life easier—and in some cases, simply livable—for us by introducing his classic fearmongering tactics to matters that have already been settled. Then there’s the Tylenol fiasco. Kennedy has called on women to restrict the use of Tylenol during pregnancy to cases where it is “absolutely necessary.” For the unaware, Tylenol is somewhat notoriously a medicine that is deemed safe during pregnancy—the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released a statement saying that Tylenol is “one of the few options available to pregnant patients to treat pain and fever.” There are all kinds of very sensible recommendations against taking certain substances during pregnancy, if at all possible, and Tylenol is not one of them. So where is Kennedy getting this? It’s another fear campaign. The evidence regarding Tylenol use while with child, he notes, “is not sufficient to say it definitely caused autism, but it is very suggestive.” These comments came on the heels of Donald Trump’s even stronger warning: “Don’t take Tylenol. Don’t take it. Fight like hell not to take it.” Science, of course, always could find a link between any given thing and anything else, but it is telling that the studies done so far on Tylenol and autism have, taken together, not found anything conclusive. And still, Kennedy is trying to knock the bottle from our hands during what is, for some women, one of the most physically unpleasant times of our lives. The war on women shows up less obviously, but perhaps with even more wide-reaching consequences, in other RFK Jr. projects. Take his stance on vaccines. He recently oversaw the removal of several from the recommended childhood immunization schedule. Who, by and large in America, will be taking care of the kids who have to stay home from school when they get sick? Who will take them to the emergency room? Who will bear the blame when what happens is even worse than an ER visit? Disproportionately, women. Then take his stance against ultraprocessed foods, which he has called a “mass poison”—and the fact that in his new food guidance, he advises that children should avoid sugar through age 10. Who will be ensuring that a Lunchable never so much as touches a child’s lips? (Lunchables: They are not healthy, but they are safe!) Who will be convincing 9-year-olds to forgo birthday cake, or figuring out what to present as a birthday treat if it is not cake? Probably the group of people who mostly take care of children: women. For the record, ultraprocessed foods are not even inherently bad. The fact is that they are a tool (like formula, like Tylenol) that can make life easier, more manageable, and even—by extension—literally healthier. These tools also allow women tasked with gestating children, caring for infants, and doing housework to not be completely consumed by it. Consider: Who even has time to prepare food entirely from scratch? To breastfeed exclusively? To lie there pregnant and in pain, just for the sake of it? A woman who does not work outside the home. Yes, women could always just not follow Kennedy’s advice. Just use formula. Just take Tylenol! Just make the mac and cheese for dinner. Just vaccinate your children. I am personally a huge fan of just exercising your own agency. But there are two issues here: One is the incredible swirl of half-realized health information that women already have to navigate, both when it comes to finding answers through official channels (doctors, often, simply have no answer for even basic inquiries into our pain) and when it comes to logging onto any social media site for any reason. There are just so many autoplaying videos of influencers out there issuing dire warnings about one thing or another that we already have to navigate, even though most of it has to do with the danger of not buying this or that gadget, or course, or coaching session that they so happen to be selling. The other is that Kennedy is shaping not just the present state of our health but the future of health care writ large. He helps decide who staffs agencies, what gets funded, which direction the country points in when it comes to research. He has overseen cuts to offices in the Department of Health and Human Services that work to improve minority health. He has done a “clean sweep” of the panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control on vaccines in order to appoint his own people. He has, in his first year at HHS, “significantly thinned out the sprawling $1.7 trillion department,” as an evenhanded report from the Associated Press put it. When it comes to women’s health specifically, he may not have (yet) shown the specific laser-focus in cutting that he has in other areas. But he has already shown a willingness to snatch away and dangle funding for research into women’s health. Last spring in a typically-chaotic MAGA move, he cut—then, following public outcry, restored—support for the sprawling Women’s Health Initiative. Consider Kennedy, then, a health influencer who has not just access to a national podium, but also a say in what happens with a hulking budget. We might be able to individually ignore his advice, even as it becomes a more and more tiring process to sort out what is true and what is not, as iterations of Kennedy’s views are repeated everywhere from the social media accounts of other influencers to the CDC’s own website. But we will, as the consequences of his agenda come to bear on who is hired by the government and what work they are able to do, increasingly simply be living in Kennedy’s world. The lesson for this second year of his tenure is clear: However exhausting it is, we have to pay attention. Pop a Tylenol and get ready to fight back.