Rhetoric and Reality: “Protecting” Women in Canadian Public Policy on Assisted Human Reproduction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the 1989 Speech from the Throne, the Government of Canada announced the calling of a Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies. Tasked with studying and reporting on the implications of new reproductive technologies, the Royal Commission’s mandate also included an explicit statement that “women’s reproductive health and well-being” would be a primary area of concern. When the Assisted Human Reproduction Act was passed fifteen years later, its governing principles included the same commitment to women’s health. As of 2012, however, much of the Act has been overturned, the agency it established is being abolished, and the criminal provisions that remain are not enforced. In short, despite ongoing commitments to protect women through public policy on assisted reproductive technologies, the field remains unregulated. This article explores the discourse of “protection” in public policy on assisted human reproduction in Canada, using the examples of the precarious position of egg donors, the high-cost of assisted reproductive services, and failures in implementing the Assisted Human Reproduction Act. Drawing on print media, parliamentary debates, academic research, and policy documents, it argues there is a significant gap between the rhetorical commitment to women’s welfare articulated in policy and the tenuous realities of women’s reproductive lives.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".