Reproductive Autonomy and the Evolving Family in the Supreme Court of Canada: Implications for Assisted Reproductive Technologies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
After the introduction of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, litigation has become a successful strategy to affect long-term policy change concerning reproductive and LGBT rights. This essay analyzes leading Supreme Court of Canada decisions, and finds that the court has moved from a conservative to a liberal position on two issues: expanding the concept of reproductive autonomy, and redefining the family, particularly in cases involving LGBT rights. Through a combination of value change, interest group formation, and institutional venue shifting, the last three decades have largely been a winning streak for social liberals in the Canadian courts. This winning streak could continue into the field of assisted reproductive technologies. In particular, existing jurisprudence could be used to aid a court challenge to Canada’s prohibitions on payment for sperm, ova, and surrogacy—all of which restrict reproductive autonomy and, by implication, non-traditional family formation.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.049 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".