Rationalizing Infanticide: A Medico-Legal Assessment of the Criminal Code’s Child Homicide Offence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article involves a discussion of the proper scope and interpretation of the Criminal Code provisions relating to the offence of infanticide. A review of the legislative history indicates that the biological rationale for the offence did not appear to have been scientifically established. Thus, despite the wording of the provision, the law of infanticide developed not from medical science, but instead as a way of dealing with unsatisfactory outcomes of homicide litigation directed at new mothers. In recent years, the medical rationale for infanticide has become less accepted and the trend has been to charge more mothers accused of killing their newborns with murder. This may be attributed, in part, because the conditions that created a sympathetic response to young women facing unwanted children in the past no longer exist. Nevertheless, it is asserted that the stress of child rearing should serve to reduce the culpability of some individuals who kill their children. Consequently, the author recommends a repeal of the current infanticide provisions, to be replaced by a more generally applicable defence of diminished responsibility applicable to not just biological mothers, but fathers and adoptive parents as well.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".