Midwifery, Informed Choice, and Reproductive Autonomy: A Relational Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the parallels between the Canadian midwifery model of care and feminist reconfigurations of autonomy and choice. A critical survey of the medical model of informed consent and traditional notions of autonomy brings to light shortcomings of bioethical theories and decision-making practices that maintain a narrow ideology of autonomy and a limited perception of human characteristics. In contrast, relational models emphasize the social situatedness of the individual, and the relationship between self-trust and autonomous decision making. Shifting beyond the consent paradigm of the medical model, the midwifery model of care and the process of informed choice demonstrate an applied form of relational autonomy. It is my contention that Canadian midwifery’s avowed emphasis on empowerment and informed choice offers an exemplary standard of practice that maximizes women’s reproductive autonomy, thus demonstrating the merits of integrating relational approaches within bioethical theory and the health care context at large.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".