Drifting Apart: the Evolution of Contemporary Abortion Policies across Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis takes an innovative approach to examining health care policy by applying the concept of policy drift to the issue of access to abortion across Canada through analyzing three explanations: the structure of Canadian federalism, women’s organizations, and rights litigation. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that section 251 of the Criminal Code of Canada was unconstitutional in R v. Morgentaler (1988). Section 251 forced women to secure the approval of a panel of medical experts in order to gain legal consent to seek an abortion. As a result of this decision, women are now able to undergo a therapeutic abortion procedure without facing criminal sanctions. However, the issue of equitable access to abortion services across Canada is still unresolved. For example, women living in Prince Edward Island have to travel out of province at their own expense to undergo an abortion procedure. Meanwhile, women in Ontario are able to undergo an abortion procedure at a number of hospitals and private clinics with provincial insurance subsidizing the financial burdens. Abortion is a time-sensitive procedure and different from other health care procedures because it is also gender-sensitive. Findings within this thesis suggest that the model of Canadian federalism contributes to the inability of women’s organizations to gain audience from the federal government and inhibits the courts from assisting in expanding provincial access, which further facilitates policy drift. Recognizing policy drift concerning access to abortion is significant because it is an issue that involves gender equity at its core as well as discussions over what society deems is a right and what society deems is fair.
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 | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".