Assisted Reproduction Policy in Canada: Framing, Federalism, and Failure, by Dave Snow
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last few years, events related to assisted reproductive technologies have frequently made headlines, from the gene-editing of human embryos to the fortieth anniversary of in vitro fertilization to celebrities’ announcements about the birth of their children by surrogates. Although these stories may not initially seem connected, each of them serves as a reminder that assisted reproductive technologies play an important role in modern reproductive healthcare. And if we dig a bit deeper, we can find a range of issues that link these reports, such as questions about the ethics of the techniques used, the accessibility and affordability of assisted reproductive technologies, and the role of government in regulating assisted reproduction. Dave Snow’s book, Assisted Reproduction Policy in Canada: Framing, Federalism, and Failure, provides a timely case study of how institutions can shape outcomes in assisted reproduction policy. Interested in how twenty years of policymaking at the federal level in assisted reproduction fell apart in 2010, Snow works to identify the reason behind the Canadian government’s failure to successfully frame and claim this policy area. He also presents a comprehensive examination of the state of Canada’s assisted reproduction policy today. And he does so by providing a rich narrative through qualitative analysis of primary and secondary documents and of debates in the Canadian parliament, as well as from interviews with policymakers, advocacy group leaders, and physicians. Using a historical institutionalist approach, Snow is able to trace the roots of the federal government’s failure to effectively govern over assisted reproduction in Canada to a critical juncture in 1993. That year, the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies published a report that described the field in conflicting terms, framing some areas of assisted reproduction policy as medically beneficial, while claiming other areas as harmful and potentially criminal. The tension between the “medical-scientific” frame and the “moral” frame, coupled with the position that the federal government had jurisdictional competence in an area of health policy, which has constitutionally been assigned to provincial governments, set Canadian assisted reproduction policy on an uncertain path.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".