In the latter half of 2024, the US public was introduced to the acronym ‘MAHA’ (Make America Healthy Again), a play on President Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) slogan. Far from a gimmick, MAHA has become a powerful political movement, encompassing a diverse coalition of weight-loss influencers, Joe Rogan listeners, and “crunchy moms,” shaping both public health policy and parenting discourse. To achieve this mainstream recognition, MAHA elevated mothers to the forefront of the movement, exploiting gendered myths about maternal instinct to bolster its legitimacy.
MAHA originated with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of then-presidential candidate Trump in 2024. With this move, Kennedy, the black sheep of the most prominent Democratic political dynasty in the United States, brought his base of health-conscious anti-establishmentarians into the MAGA faithful. To many who recognized the harms perpetuated by the current food and drug industries, this union seemed bizarre but perhaps suggested bipartisan hope. Yet, mainstream coverage of Kennedy’s eccentricities overshadowed a troubling, decades-long commitment to furthering unsubstantiated vaccine skepticism, which undeniably lies at the root of his critiques of the scientific establishment and takes precedence over meaningful systemic reform efforts.
Kennedy’s first foray into health policy was his 2005 Rolling Stone article “Deadly Immunity.” In the now-retracted article, Kennedy alleged collusion between “Big Pharma” and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to cover up a supposedly causal link between vaccines and autism. From 2015 to 2023, Kennedy chaired Children’s Health Defense, a health misinformation and anti-vaccine advocacy group that has attempted to link chronic childhood conditions to vaccination, water fluoridation, and wireless communications, among other “toxins.” He also penned the 2021 bestseller, The Real Anthony Fauci, which, alongside vaccine denialism, promotes HIV/AIDS denialism and Covid-19 conspiracies.
Despite opposition from a coalition of over 75 Nobel Laureates, 17,000 doctors, and 87 civil society organizations, Kennedy was confirmed as the US Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) in February 2025. On the day Kennedy was confirmed, Trump issued an executive order establishing the MAHA Commission, with Kennedy as its Chair. The commission was tasked with examining the potential dangers of prescription medications as well as researching the origins of childhood diseases and mental disorders.
As the MAHA Commission and HHS began to focus on children’s health, women became more prominent members of the movement. Core to the appeal of the “MAHA Moms,” as these women have become known, are deeply entrenched societal beliefs about the essential goodness, intuitiveness, and protectiveness of women and mothers, which transcend political parties. The idea that mothers have a gut instinct is practically ubiquitous—think of the stories of mothers sensing that their children are in danger, only to be proven correct soon after.
The myth of maternal intuition frames a mother’s subjective perceptions as inherently trustworthy, ignoring social, cultural, and emotional factors that may lead to incorrect judgments. This phenomenon is employed throughout the MAHA movement to amplify unscientific and conspiratorial beliefs. Mothers are convinced that their anxieties about omnipresent risks to their children are valid because they are mothers with special maternal instincts.
Take our culture’s unfounded suspicion of “chemicals”—a term many use to refer to artificial, man-made substances. The MAHA movement exploits and expands this fear of “chemicals,” dubbed chemonoia, to convince mothers that poisons—such as fluoride in drinking water—are everywhere in their children’s daily lives. To MAHA proponents, good mothers can sense that “chemicals” are unnatural and therefore dangerous for their children. Even when scientists and doctors reassure them otherwise, MAHA moms must not relent, as their biological wisdom trumps the medical establishment.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers studying the proliferation of anti-vaccine content on social media found that narratives of good motherhood were strategically employed to encourage vaccine refusal. Those pushing anti-vaccine rhetoric employed three interrelated tropes of motherhood, which the researchers identified as the “‘intuitive mother,’ the ‘protective mother,’ and the ‘doting mother.’” In employing the trope of the intuitive mother, anti-vaccine activists covet maternal intuition “an innate form of wisdom,” over the professional knowledge of medical experts, who are framed as the unintuitive scientific elite.
Yet the myth of maternal intuition is actually a product of heteropatriarchal family systems that entrust mothers with primary authority over their children. The myth stems from the overarching belief that mothers are innately suited to handle the majority of childcare—a social construct that upholds the current gendered division of labor. The idea that mothers have a preternatural understanding of their children legitimizes this notion, upholding the expectation that women should bear the majority of the child-rearing burden as they “naturally” understand their children better than traditional science.
Mothers, who make approximately 80 percent of health care decisions for their children, are forced to shoulder a crushing burden. When their children fall ill, they are disproportionately likely to be their primary caregivers. Within this patriarchal framework—bolstered by the myth of maternal intuition—mothers are isolated within the home and forced to make sacrifices in silence, increasing their anxiety and making them more vulnerable to misinformation. This devastating status quo has long-term health implications for both mothers and their children, as well as our overall public health.
An article from The New York Times describes the way that the proliferation of fearmongering about chemicals by MAHA proponents has infected day-to-day parenting discourse. Convinced of the dangers of omnipresent toxic chemicals, mothers are guilt-tripped into purchasing more expensive “organic” goods and are sold numerous products to purify their water, detox their livers, and boost their immune system’s ability to fight toxins. Mothers in both conservative and liberal circles described a sudden push within their communities toward drinking raw milk, shirking traditional childhood vaccine schedules, and adopting hypervigilance against microplastics, ultra-processed foods, and seed oils. The lifestyle of a perfect MAHA mom is unsustainable and unaffordable for most families, yet mothers are told that if they fail to guard their children from toxic chemicals, they are essentially poisoning them and dooming them to a life of chronic disease and mental illness.
In addition to creating unnecessary anxiety based on faulty evidence, the MAHA ideology advocates for explicitly dangerous decisions. Overriding scientific consensus, the CDC website now claims that “studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism,” parroting the anti-vaccine rhetoric that has led to the resurgence of many nearly eliminated diseases and caused preventable deaths and hospitalizations. In 2000, measles was declared eliminated from the United States. From 1997 to 2013, no more than 220 cases of measles were reported in any given year. So far, in 2025, more than 1,700 cases of measles have been reported, 92 percent of which have been in unvaccinated individuals or those with unknown vaccination status. So far, in 2025, three people have died from measles, more than in the past 25 years. The products that MAHA encourages people to consume can also be dangerous; raw milk, hawked by MAHA proponents, can carry harmful germs such as Salmonella and Listeria, which can, in extreme cases, lead to death.
Dismantling the influence of the MAHA conspiracy on motherhood and parenting requires more than just debunking, however. We must deconstruct the myth of maternal intuition and demand change to the current gendered division of labor. We must also recognize the legitimate, evidence-based threats to public health posed by climate change, corporate capture, and gross wealth disparities. Only then can we truly make America healthy.