Bibliographic record
Abstract
The regime for the formal establishment of parent-child relationships in the province of Quebec was substantially modified in 2002 in order to achieve equality. Reforms to filiation – the legal bond connecting child and mother or child and father – in Quebec provided means for same-sex couples to adopt, for lesbian couples to conceive using donated sperm and clarified the filiation of children born of assisted procreation. This ‘successful’ reform in terms of equality left untouched an existing rule justified by women’s equality, namely, what the civil law calls the absolute nullity of surrogacy agreements. Surrogacy raises questions about what is left after an equality-driven reform. Since 2002, in line with the rise of sexless reproduction (i.e. reproduction disconnected theoretically and practically from sexuality), surrogacy has attracted much attention in Quebec. In 2014 the Court of Appeal rendered judgment in its first surrogacy case lower Quebec courts have rendered nine decisions, scholarly articles on the issue abound and the topic has been covered in various media. This article does not argue for or against surrogacy. Instead, it challenges conceptions and understandings about parentage, gender roles and sexuality using surrogacy as the principal locus of analysis. The exploration is discursive and metaphoric; it tackles the jurist’s imagination. It proposes a new narrative on an issue that has been extensively studied. Refraining from drawing any firm legal conclusions – the small pool of decisions available makes generalization hazardous – I want to speculate about the ways in which an uncertain legal norm – the absolute nullity of surrogacy agreements – makes space for problematic labels to enter legal reasoning. I show how the absolute nullity of surrogacy agreements in Quebec has led judges to ban the filiation of children born of surrogacy in certain situations and how it has forced judges to apply creative, albeit unpredictable, solutions. A central historic argument running through the text is that Quebec’s regime on filiation is a powerful device to control or hierarchize sexual behaviours and that surrogacy could be its new power tool.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".