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Scientific Understandings Of Postpartum Illness: Improving Health Law And Policy?, Stacey A. Tovino

Scholarly Works

In its broadest sense, the 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 recgonition 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 …