Viability: A Cultural Calculus of Personhood at the Beginnings of Life
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article addresses birth and the recognition of personhood. It is about the calculated acts of recognition that take place at the beginnings of life when the obligation to protect and extend physical care is uncertain. It examines these dilemmas from the perspective of clinicians and scientists who assist in birth through their work with embryos, fetuses, and extremely premature infants in the United States. Through multisited ethnography and in-depth interviews at a leading U.S. teaching hospital, this article argues that the concept of viability operates as a placeholder for the recognition of personhood at the beginnings of life. Articulated in a language of survival and stratified by gestational age, this article explores how viability is a central organizing principle in the management of birth. It aims to situate questions about the value of life to the maternity unit where patients and clinicians face choices about the kinds of viability-and as a result persons-that are possible and desired within the contemporary culture of hospital births.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 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 it