Eloquent (In)action: Enforcement and Prosecutorial Restraint in the Transnational Trade in Human Eggs As Deep Ambivalence about the Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article approaches a piece of Canadian criminal legislation by analyzing the law’s extraterritorial effect and putting the law’s practical import within a mobile and global context—and from that perspective concludes that the domestic law is practically and morally impoverished. The law in question is section 7 of the Assisted Human Reproduction Act (AHRA), which criminally prohibits the purchase, offer to purchase, and advertising for purchase of gametes from a donor or from a person acting on behalf of a donor. While large swathes of the AHRA were held to violate the division of powers in a 2010 Supreme Court reference, section 7 remains standing as valid federal legislation, though effectively almost never enforced. Some scholars, notably Francoise Baylis and Jocelyn Downie, urge more rigorous enforcement both within Canada and extraterritorially, drawing on common law principles that stretch the long law of Canadian penal statutes across national borders. Sara Cohen and Susan Drummond argue that not only is the extraterritorial reach of the Canadian executive drastically shorter than Baylis and Downie might wish, a growing and elite transnational reproductive traffic has outpaced and undermined the moral legitimacy of the law domestically. They argue that any well-founded policy aspirations behind section 7 are far more likely to be met with the repeal of section 7 in favour of an administrative regime for the regulation of reproductive technologies. The result would be less hypocritical and more democratic.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".