The Ethical and Legal Conundrum: Should a Mother Owe a Duty of Care to her Unborn Child?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is likely that, for emotional and moral reasons, the vast majority of society would agree with the proposition that a mother ought to care for and protect her unborn child. However, it is questionable whether those same members of society would all agree with the imposition of a broad, legally enforceable duty of care on an expectant mother, when armed with knowledge of the consequences that may flow from breach of such a duty. This research paper seeks to examine the competing international policy considerations in order to conclude whether the imposition of such a duty is appropriate and acceptable in modern Australia. This analysis will compare the approaches to such a duty in Canada and the United Kingdom. Presently in Australia, the circumstances under which a mother owes a duty of care to her unborn child are not settled. The Australian legislature and judiciary are yet to reach a definitive conclusion as to the extent of the duty of care owed by a mother to her unborn child.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".