Prepping the cut : caesarean section scenarios in English Canada, 1945-1970
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At the beginning of the 21st century, Canadian public debates about caesarean section centre on the relative agency of mothers and medical professionals in choosing the preferred birthing method. A 2006 study at the University of British Columbia aims to determine why the Pacific has the highest caesarean rate in the country. According to its authors, BC’s rate is 27% despite the World Health Organization’s advocacy of a rate between 10 and 15 percent. The highlighting of this discrepancy in the pages of the popular Vancouver Sun typifies the public concern that today so commonly echoes professional unease. Sandwiched between the era of development and professionalization – 1900 to 1950 – explored in Mitchinson’s critical chapter on c-sections, and the widespread acceptance that occurred in the 1970s and beyond, lie the often overlooked years, 1945-1970, which first saw c-sections solidified in treatment and entrenched in medical and social discourses. At the end of WWII, Canadian mothers and medical professionals were about to embark on a quarter-of-a-century consideration of how reduction of risk in c-sections could contribute to positive outcomes. This dissertation examines the social, technological, professional, and discursive factors that converged throughout the post-war period in Canada, arguing that medical technological developments of this time period coupled with developments in the professionalization of obstetrics, the substantial broadening of state health infrastructure post-WWII, and a significant shift in ideological constructions of motherhood according to white, middle-class standards contributed to an increased comfort with the practice of caesarean section.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".