Situating Canada’s Commercial Surrogacy Ban in a Transnational Context: A Postcolonial Feminist Call for Legalization and Public Funding
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In large part due to feminist interventions in the early 1990s about the dangers of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) for women, Canada banned several practices related to ARTs when it enacted the Assisted Human Reproduction Act (AHRA) in 2004. Notably, the AHRA prohibited commercial surrogacy. Feminists feared that a market in surrogacy would exploit and objectify marginalized Canadian women who would be pressured into renting out their wombs to bear children for privileged couples. Since the early feminist deliberations that led to the ban, surrogacy has globalized. Canadians and other citizens of the Global North routinely travel to the Global South to source gestational surrogates. In doing so, they partake in an industry that heavily depends on material disparities and discursive ideologies of gender, class, and race. Indeed, the transnational nature of surrogacy treatment substantially reshapes the earlier feminist commodification debates informing the AHRA that took the domestic sphere as the presumed terrain of contestation. Due to the transnational North-South nature of surrogacy, a postcolonial feminist perspective should guide feminist input on whether to allow commercial surrogacy in Canada. I argue that when this framework is applied to the issue, the resulting analysis favours legalization of commercial surrogacy in Canada as well as public funding for domestic surrogacy services and ancillary ARTs.
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".