Decriminalizing Payment of Gamete Donors and Surrogates in Canada: An Analysis of Factors Influencing the Public Debate in Light of Bill C-404
Bibliographic record
Abstract
English abstract: On 29 May 2018, the Liberal MP Anthony Housefather tabled Bill C-404 titled An Act to amend the Assisted Human Reproduction Act which seeks to decriminalize the payment of gamete donors and surrogates across Canada. Although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau indicated the importance of having a societal debate on the subject, the bill was read only once by the House of Commons before it died on the Order Paper. Bill C404 aimed to increase the number of Canadian gamete donors and surrogates to fulfill Canada’s domestic needs, which are purportedly not being met because of a lack of economic incentives on the supply side and the existence of a grey market that deters some Canadians in acting as donors or surrogates and causes intending parents to fear being criminally sanctioned if the reimbursement they pay is deemed unrelated or unreasonable. While Bill C-404 has not been adopted by Parliament, this paper seeks to analyze the policy tensions at the heart of the decriminalization of payment of donors and surrogates — tensions that may well resurface in the future. As long as the alleged shortage of donors and surrogates persists, stakeholders are likely to continue to advocate for legislative change. French abstract: Le 29 mai 2018, le depute liberal Anthony Housefather a depose le projet de loi C-404 intitule Loi modifiant la Loi sur la procreation assistee, qui vise a decriminaliser le paiement des donneurs de gametes et des meres porteuses au Canada. Bien que le premier ministre Justin Trudeau ait souligne l’importance d’avoir un debat de societe sur le sujet, le projet de loi n’a ete lu qu’une seule fois par la Chambre des communes avant de mourir au feuilleton. Le projet de loi C-404 visait a augmenter le nombre de donneurs de gametes et de meres porteuses pour repondre aux besoins interieurs du Canada qui ne seraient pas satisfaits en raison du manque d’incitatifs economiques et de l’existence d’un marche gris qui dissuade certains Canadiens d’agir comme donneurs ou meres porteuses et qui fait en sorte que les parents craignent de possibles sanctions criminelles si le remboursement qu’ils offrent est juge non-relie ou deraisonnable. Bien que le projet de loi C-404 n’ait pas ete adopte par le Parlement, le present document cherche a analyser les tensions politiques qui sont au cœur de la decriminalisation de la remuneration des donneurs et des meres porteuses—tensions qui pourraient bien reapparaitre dans l’avenir, car la penurie alleguee de donneurs et de meres porteuses est susceptible de persister et il est probable que les intervenants continueront a plaider pour un changement legislatif.
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 | 0.016 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| 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".