(Re)Forming Parenthood: The Assignment of Legal Parentage Within Planned Lesbian Families
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Planned lesbian families - defined here as families in which a single lesbian woman or a lesbian couple decide to have a child using some form of assisted conception - are greater in number and more visible today than ever before, yet only a single Canadian province has attempted to address through legislation the assignment of legal parentage within them. The absence of legislation in this area is of great concern to lesbian mothers and their children who, unable to fall back on legislative presumptions or those derived from biology, live with considerable legal uncertainty. Given the unique legal and social issues raised by lesbian families, the enduring homophobia that continues to characterize their experience of family, and the lack of Canadian research in the field, planned lesbian families warrant specific empirical attention. This article tackles the question of how legal parentage might be assigned within planned lesbian families drawing on empirical data collected through 36 interviews with 49 lesbian mothers living in British Columbia and Alberta. It addresses how lesbian mothers understand and define parenthood within their own families, and how their understandings and definitions might be translated into a law reform context. It concludes by offering a law reform proposal grounded in intentionality, one that presumptively protects the lesbian nuclear family and allows for the possibility of three or four-parent families in instances where the presumptive parents have agreed to such an arrangement.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".