Community, contraception, and controversy: a history of the Lethbridge Birth Control and Information Centre in the 1970s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This honours thesis examines the history of the Lethbridge Birth Control and Information Centre (LBCIC) and the representation and acceptance of it within the community of Lethbridge as well as the Centre’s influence on the local community. The LBCIC represents the wider fight for women’s reproductive rights, acceptance of all sexualities, and women’s equality in the 1970s. This Southern Albertan organization is particularly significant because there is still a regional resistance to accessible contraception and women’s reproductive rights. The purpose of this honours thesis is to fill the historical gap and to educate scholars and citizens of Southern Alberta on this significant history of regional women’s activism. This research illustrates how the community of Lethbridge was divided in terms of social views, mores and acceptance of the services and education provided by LBCIC. The story of the struggle to establish the LBCIC in Southern Alberta enlarges the history of birth control activism in Canada. Moreover, I hope to inspire continued awareness of the importance of women’s reproductive rights through this research. The first chapter, using material from interviews recognizes the organized activism of these five women, and how they raised consciousness about women’s reproductive rights in Lethbridge, and Canadian, society during the 1970s. The first chapter also determines that their advocacy widens the national historical narrative on birth control and women’s reproductive rights activism by including Southern Albertan, rural, and small town activist experiences. The second chapter investigates letters to Lethbridge City Council during the 1974 LBCIC funding controversy, analyzing public declarations of parental authority to argue against the supporters of the LBCIC. Chapter three discusses the eroding boundaries public/private divide posed by birth control debate.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".