Orli Dahan

Objective This study examines whether mode of birth is associated with postpartum psychological distress among women who experienced high-risk versus low-risk pregnancies. It adds an ethical perspective to the literature by considering how medicalization of birth may differentially affect women’s autonomy and well-being across pregnancy risk contexts. Method In a cohort of 138 women who gave birth at a northern Israeli hospital (January to September 2023), psychological outcomes were measured eight weeks postpartum using the DASS-21 and PTSD Checklist (PCL-5). Birth mode and pregnancy risk status were extracted from medical records. Pearson correlations were computed separately for high-risk (n = 20) and low-risk (n = 118) groups. Results Among women with high-risk pregnancies, more medicalized birth modes were significantly correlated with higher levels of stress (rp = 0.655), anxiety (rp = 0.863), depression (rp = 0.726), and PTSD symptoms (rp = 0.789). No significant associations were found in the low-risk group. Conclusions Birth mode plays a critical role in postpartum mental health for women with high-risk pregnancies. These findings underscore the ethical duty to prevent psychological harm and to respect women’s relational autonomy, making trauma-informed, autonomy-supportive care a moral imperative in medically complex births.

I argue that in modern algebraic-formulated science the ‘physical constant’ can be understood, for practical purposes, as an ‘identifier’ of a universal law of nature. This identifying role is possible because the concept of ‘physical constant’ fulfills the same need for universality, stability, and fundamentality (as universal laws) for increasing the epistemic value of a scientific theory. This can be demonstrated in two different ways. The first involves a thought experiment envisioning science without physical constants, which appears to be a science of local and particular laws. The second is the observation that physical constants mostly emerge as components in an algebraic formulation of universal laws, but not in the algebraic formulation of particular laws. This observation about the link between physical constants and universal laws of nature, if correct, makes two contributions. First, it clarifies, at least partially, the ambiguity in the use (and the absence) of the concept ‘law’ in contemporary science. Second, it can help in distinguishing between a universal law and a particular law, while avoiding one of the abiding philosophical problems regarding laws of nature—the problem of the ceteris-paribus criterion for a generalization.

The most common catchphrase of physicalism is: “everything is physical”. According to Hempel’s Dilemma, however, physicalism is an ill-formed thesis because it can offer no account of the physics to which it refers: current physics will definitely be revised in the future, and we do not yet know the nature of future physics. The di-lemma arises due to our difficulty to set the boundaries of the concept ‘physical.’ In order to confront the dilemma, a physicalist must ensure that physics is not going to broaden itself artificially (or in some trivial way) to become complete—perhaps by adding non-reductive mental entities to elementary physical theory, making it impossible to distinguish physicalism from dualism. I offer a solution to the dilemma which is a version of the ‘via negativa’ (standardly taken to be a stipulation that the physical not include the mental), albeit one that is specified and worked out in a distinctive way. My suggested formulation of the physicalist hypothesis allows us to establish a refutation condition of physicalism. The refutation condition is general and not only dualistic. Consequently, the physicalist can choose the second horn of the dilemma, and hold that physicalism is indeed refutable (and not a trivial thesis).

This paper examines the systematic omission of childbirth from evolutionary psychology, arguing that this lacuna reflects deeper epistemological and ideological limitations within the field. While evolutionary psychology frequently theorizes reproductive behavior, particularly mating and parenting – it largely ignores the behavioral and psychological dimensions of the birthing process itself. Through a critical textual analysis of 10 major evolutionary psychology textbooks, the paper reveals a striking absence of attention to birthing women as active agents. Drawing on feminist epistemology and interdisciplinary perspectives from evolutionary anthropology, bioarcheology, and medical anthropology, the paper identifies two central blind spots in evolutionary psychology: the marginalization of childbirth due to gendered aesthetic norms and the constraining influence of functionalist explanatory models. The phenomenon of “birthing consciousness” is proposed as a case of evolved psychological adaptation overlooked by the discipline. By situating childbirth as a culturally embedded and psychologically complex event, this paper challenges evolutionary psychology’s narrow focus on universal adaptationist claims and calls for a broader, more integrative theoretical framework. The case of childbirth serves as an illustrative case through which to interrogate how disciplinary assumptions shape what is considered legitimate psychological knowledge – and whose experiences are rendered invisible.

Postpartum mood disorders develop shortly after childbirth in a significant proportion of women and have severe effects. Two evolutionary explanations are currently available. The first is that poor postpartum mental health is a consequence of an evolutionary trade-off – a compromise of neurological changes in the maternal brain during pregnancy which, on the one hand, maintain pregnancy, and on the other, increase the likelihood for postpartum women to develop psychopathology. The second explanation is that poor postpartum mental health is a disease of civilization. This theoretical paper demonstrates that both explanations ignore the crucial event of childbirth. I elaborate on environmental features of childbirth, a physiological process that is substantially different in the current versus evolutionary childbirth and postpartum setting, and argue that maternal brain neuroplasticity and biochemical alterations are not an evolutionary trade-off, but an adaptation. Additionally, the incidents of poor postpartum mental health are better viewed as a maladaptation of the typical modern environments – an evolutionary mismatch. Thus, the potential to suffer from poor mental health in postpartum is an external, contingent happening, dependent on contemporary childbirth and postpartum environments, and not due to any essential property women possess as a result of evolutionary compromise. In fact, women are probably adapted to feel like superwomen right after birth, a state of mind that is an aid in adapting to motherhood. Distinguishing between evolutionary concepts in the context of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood is vital for developing more accurate preventions and interventions.

In recent papers, Eric Schwitzgebel argues that if physicalism is true, then the United States is probably conscious. My primary aim here is to demonstrate that the source of Schwitzgebel’s conditional argument is the “Problem of Other Minds,” which is a general problem; wherefore, Schwitzgebel’s conclusion should be revised and applied not only to physicalism, but to most contemporary theories of the mind. I analyze the difference between Schwitzgebel’s argument and other arguments against functionalism, arguing that the difference between them is rooted in referring to the causal role of the whole system, rather than referring to the casual role of the system’s parts. This key difference between functionalism and behaviorism explains why the source of Schwitzgebel’s argument stems from the problem of other minds. I conclude that however counterintuitive from a metaphysical point of view, the United States may have its own stream of consciousness, but it has nothing to do with physicalism in particular.