Scientific Understandings of Postpartum Illness: Improving Health Law and Policy?

Abstract

In its broadest sense, this Article examines the relationship between science and the law in the context of postpartum illness. From classical antiquity to the present day, physicians and scientists have investigated the causes, correlates, and consequences of the depressions and psychoses that develop in some women following their transition to motherhood. The scientific investigation of postpartum illness has been characterized by an open-ended search for knowledge with the recognition that scientific findings published one day are subject to revision the next. Legislators and judges also have sought to understand postpartum illness as necessary to make laws that affect and adjudicate disputes involving new mothers, although legal inquiries regarding postpartum illness have yielded factual findings that are fixed in time. When the results of scientific research and legal research are compared in the context of postpartum illness, several differences emerge, perhaps because science and law share neither a common process nor common goals. This Article resolves these differences and develops a new organizing principle for understanding illness; that is, a unified health law framework that limits distinctions between physical and mental illness.

Keywords: Postpartum Depression, Postpartum Psychosis, Law, Ethics, Neurolaw, Neuroethics, Neuroscience, Neuroimaging