Autonomous from the Start: Single Mothers by Choice in the Canadian Legal System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As women achieve greater economic independence and the traditional family continues to decline, the number of women who choose to become single mothers has grown. While the emergence of single mothers by choice (SMCs) suggests that societal acceptance of autonomous motherhood may be on the rise, at least in circumstances where the woman is older, educated and financially stable, the law has been far less receptive. In the few cases in which SMCs have sought to assert their autonomy through the courts, they have met with significant resistance. Reflecting the current trends in family law towards shared parenting and fathers’ rights, courts have strongly opposed attempts by mothers to exclude ‘fathers’, whether biological or social, from the lives of children. This article explores the legal and social issues raised by single mothering by choice, focusing specifically on the response of Canadian courts to SMCs who have asserted their right to parent autonomously from a partner.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".