Canadian Infanticide Legislation, 1948 and 1955: Reflections on the Medicalization/Autopoiesis Debate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article provides a sociological analysis of the discursive interpretations of the criminal law mitigation frameworks underpinning infanticide law in England and Canada. The passage of infanticide legislation by the Canadian Parliament in 1948 and 1955 is described. The account is contrasted with Tony Ward’s analysis of the passage of English legislation in 1922 and 1938. The Canadian legislation of 1948 was based on the English Infanticide Act of 1922. Ward claims that his account shows that, despite obvious appearances and the views of socio-legal commentators writing during the 1980s and ’90s, infanticide law is not an example of the medicalization of women’s deviance but, if anything, more closely exemplifies law as an autopoietic system of communication which “enslaves” medical concepts, adapting them for its own strictly legal purposes. We argue that, while Ward’s critique of the medicalization interpretation of infanticide law is broadly apposite, autopoiesis theory provides an overwrought alternative. This is especially true for the Canadian legislation.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| 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".