Sterilization and Birth Control in the Shadow of Eugenics: Married, Middle-Class Women in Alberta, 1930–1960s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The history of eugenic sterilization connotes draconian images of coerced and involuntary procedures robbing men and women of their reproductive health. While eugenics programs often fit this characterization, there is another, smaller, and less obvious legacy of eugenics that arguably contributed to a more empowering image of reproductive health. Sexual sterilization surgeries as a form of contraception began to gather momentum alongside eugenics programs in the middle of the 20th century and experiences among prairie women serve as an illustrative example. Alberta maintained its eugenics program from 1929 to 1972 and engaged in thousands of eugenic sterilizations, but by the 1940s middle-class married women pressured their Albertan physicians to provide them with sterilization surgeries to control fertility, as a matter of choice. The multiple meanings and motivations behind this surgery introduced a moral quandary for physicians, which encourages medical historians to revisit the history of eugenics and its relationship to the contemporaneous birth control movement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".