BALTIMORE -- Pam Stiner can’t even remember if she took Tylenol when she was pregnant with her now 10-year-old son, but the Trump administration’s linking of the over-the-counter painkiller to autism on Monday brought back the self-reproach she felt when he was diagnosed as on the spectrum.

“It’s taken me 10 years to get to the point where I’m not blaming myself,” the Ellicott City, Maryland, mother said. “It reignites this guilt feeling that I’ve done something wrong.”

Stiner, the vice president of the Autism Society of Maryland, was among those who felt the White House news conference represented a step backward for those in the community who have worked for acceptance and evidence-based research about the disorder.

In addition to telling women not to take Tylenol during pregnancy, despite the lack of scientific evidence that it causes autism, Trump and his administration announced that it would make leucovorin, a version of vitamin B9, or folate, available to treat children with autism.

When Steven Isaacson, a social worker for those who like him have autism, read about the Trump administration’s statements, he said he told his partner, “This seems like we’re going back 20 years.

“We have a history of blaming parents, especially mothers,” the Montgomery County-based Isaacson said. “There’s a history of, we can call it quack, not well-evidenced research. It really harms autistic people.

“We’ve moved to acceptance, and we can’t go backward and take our foot off the gas,” he said.

A sampling of area parents on Tuesday found a range of views on the pronouncements from the White House.

Amb Rose, a mother of three, said she is grateful for the subject of Tylenol being raised and how it “raises the question” of “what you’re putting in your body.”

“We have become a more overly medicated society in general,” she said, speaking outside Barclay Elementary School in Baltimore. “I don’t know if Tylenol is to blame, but there’s something definitely going on with the amount of the increase in [prescribing] medications, also in the dosages of things that our children, while they’re young, are accessing.”

Rose said she has “issues with our codependency on medication,” and the companies making money off of that.

“So it’s time for us to take the health out of the hands of the people who are making the money. That’s the real problem,” she said. The health is in the hands of the millionaires and the greedy folk and the people who are not really concerned about people.”

But Laura Stella, a mother of two who was also at the school during pick-up time, said she is “not at all” changing her use of Tylenol as a result of the administration’s statements.

“I don’t know how [Trump] can say such things without medical evidence, because I’ve been listening to the news, and it’s been debunked that there’s a correlation between the two,” she said.

“It’s really causing a lot of confusion and just people questioning,” she said. “They should just talk to their doctor and get good, real medical advice, instead of listening to political people telling you what you should or should not do.”

While some studies have shown that prenatal use of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, may increase the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder, researchers have also said more studies are needed before determining causality.

The co-author of one article published in August, Ann Bauer, a University of Massachusetts epidemiologist, told NPR the Trump administration “may be jumping the gun.

“I think those of us in the research community would like to see stronger evidence,” Bauer said.

Another study, also published in August, whose senior author discussed the research with Kennedy, found that the association between acetaminophen and autism is strongest when the painkiller is taken for four or more weeks. The researchers found that acetaminophen remains an important remedy for treating a pregnant woman’s fever and pain, both of which can harm the developing fetus.

Vince Culotta, a neuropsychologist in Columbia, said he objects to the Trump administration’s framing of autism as a disease and an epidemic.

While he is seeing more patients with the disorder, that can be attributed to an expanded definition of those on the spectrum, a better understanding of how it presents itself differently in females and increased diagnoses of non-white children who previously may have been missed.

“We are getting better at screening,” Culotta said.

Given the implications of the disorder, he said, parents of children on the spectrum will jump at the chance of any treatment that might improve their lives. The Trump administration, by promoting leucovorin, is raising “false hope,” Culotta said.

“For a parent, the loss of normalcy for their child is a tremendous loss, one that takes years to process emotionally,” he said. “You’ll grasp at anything to take back that normalcy.”

Stiner agreed and said the Trump administration’s focus on autism strikes her as not helpful but “just so misguided.

“The attention feels veiled in guilt, in ‘there’s something wrong with you,'” she said. “It’s not adding anything new or constructive to navigate this world we live in.”

For Dr. Theresa Nguyen, chairman of pediatrics at GBMC, the attention-getting autism announcements add to the misinformation physicians already have to address with patients these days — particularly on the subject of vaccines, which Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said are at least partly to blame for the disorder.

“We are so tired of feeling the need to right the wrong info out there,” she said.

“Autism is a multi-factoral disorder,” Nguyen said. “Looking at just one drug that a mom may use in pregnancy with a multi-factoral disorder is unexplainable to me.”

Also baffling to her is the promotion of a form of folate as a treatment for autism. Folate is indeed “very important to brain development” in utero, which is why it’s given to pregnant women.

“I’m at a loss at how giving this after you are born, how that is going to alter your symptoms with autism,” she said. “I don’t know why [Tylenol] got demonized and one got raised to, ‘this is a magical cure.'”

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