On September 22, 2025, Carrie Cariello was at her home in New Hampshire when she received a message from her son Jack, 21, with level 1 autism. It said:
“Did you take Tylenol while you were pregnant with me?’. Few questions can carry so much weight in so few words.
The trigger was the announcement by the Trump administration and RFK Jr. about a new FDA recommendation linking acetaminophen during pregnancy to autism, and Jack had seen it.
Carrie, who has written books and an entire blog about what it means to love a child with autism, whom the world does not always understand, suddenly found herself answering a question that had no clear answer: science, in fact, has not confirmed any causal link.
Organizations such as Johns Hopkins and Yale University have reviewed it and found no conclusive evidence.
But science does not always arrive before guilt. And Carrie knows well what it is like to carry that guilt without anyone taking it away.
What makes this story extraordinary is not the political controversy or the medical question. It is that an adult son, with autism and a fully functional life, who lives in a supported residential program, thought of his mom when he wanted to understand the world and why he is the way he is.