Shifting Rationales: The Waning Influence of Feminism on Canada’s Embryo Research Restrictions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes the competing influences on the federal government's policy and eventual legislative action regarding embryo research in Canada. Beginning with the events surrounding the establishment of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, the article traces the diminishing importance of feminist rationales to the ultimate legislation regulating embryo research, the Assisted Human Reproduction Act. The article reveals the steady rise of pro-life discourse that has helped to displace feminist concerns about the threats to women’s bodies posed by new reproductive technologies in general and, instead, made the embryo the focus of legislative debates. As legal debates around abortion are relatively settled in Canada, the authors conclude that pro-life arguments are enjoying a level of respect in the embryo research context and a political and legal voice that has been denied in the abortion arena. The article ends by briefly raising questions regarding the discursive impact of this resurgence on attitudes towards abortion.
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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 | 0.038 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.062 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".