Relationally Speaking: The Implications of Treating Embryos as Property in a Canadian Context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In July 2018, the Ontario Superior Court, in S.H. v D.H., dealt with a dispute between a recently separated couple over a frozen embryo that the couple had created. In his judgment, Justice Del Frate stated that the embryo should be conceived of as property. This was the cause of uproar among feminist legal scholars who were concerned with the possible repercussions for cisgender women of labeling embryos as property. The Superior Court decision was subsequently overturned by the Ontario Court of Appeal this past May (2019). However, given the likelihood that embryos will be treated as property in future disputes, it is important to assess what the ramifications of this type of categorization might be.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".