Arguing Abortion: The New Anti-Abortion Discourse in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract.This article analyzes the nature of contemporary anti-abortion discourse in Canada. Based on a rigorous qualitative and quantitative analysis of the public discourse of a wide variety of influential actors, this study shows that contemporary anti-abortion discourse in Canada is quite different than the portrait offered by traditional accounts. Specifically, our analysis demonstrates that the new anti-abortion discourse aims at changing cultural values more than legislation; is explicitly framed as ‘pro-woman’; largely avoids appealing to religious grounds; and relies on a new ‘abortion-harms-women’ argument that has supplanted and transformed traditional fetal personhood arguments. The article argues that these findings are important as they provide a more accurate account of the political discourse surrounding one of the most contentious issues in politics today and because they illustrate broader ideological patterns that are increasingly characteristic of Canadian political discourse. Résumé.Cet article propose d'analyser la nature du discours contemporain sur l'anti-avortement au Canada. Fondée sur une analyse qualitative et quantitative rigoureuse du discours public d'une grande variété d'acteurs influents, cette étude démontre que le discours contemporain sur l'anti-avortement au Canada se distingue de manière caractéristique du portrait qu'il en a traditionnellement été donné. Notre analyse révèle en particulier que le nouveau discours sur l'anti-avortement vise plutôt à transformer les valeurs culturelles que la législation; qu'il est explicitement formulé comme étant « pro-femme »; qu'il évite de faire appel à des motifs religieux; et qu'il déploie un nouvel argument, « l'avortement-nuit-aux-femmes », qui évince et transforme les arguments traditionnels qui cherchaient à accorder le statut de personne au fétus. Cet article argumente alors que ces constats sont importants non seulement parce qu'ils permettent de brosser un tableau plus complet du discours politique qui touche à l'une des questions les plus controversée de la politique contemporaine, mais également parce qu'ils mettent en évidence des tendances idéologiques de plus en plus caractéristiques du discours politique au Canada.
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 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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".