“In the Image and Likeness of God”: Christianity and Public Opinion on Abortion in <i>The Globe and Mail</i> during the 1960s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the 1960s, Canadians were grappling with the social and legal changes that directly affected women’s reproductive lives. One of the contexts in which these changes were occurring was the growing secularization of society. The authors’ analysis of letters to the editors of the Globe and Mail on abortion, however, reveals that over 70% of the letters referenced religious beliefs or institutions. The authors use these letters to explore the ways that readers who commented on abortion referenced religion to legitimize their positions. Specifically, they explore the expressions of the place of Christian beliefs and institutions in discussions of law reform and ideas about women’s roles in a modernizing Canadian society. Examination of the readers’ letters on abortion illuminates perceptions of the churches’ place in a modernizing society, and the degree to which churches were seen as responsive and responsible to their constituents. While religion was a contested field in the abortion law reform debate of the 1960s, it was not ignored; this analysis helps to complicate our understandings of secularization in Canada during the 1960s.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".