Suppressing Damages in Involuntary Parenthood Actions: Contorting Tort Law, Denying Reproductive Freedom, and Discriminating Against Mothers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
"Involuntary parenthood" actions are negligence actions, usually medical malpractice cases involving a failed sterilization, inadequate warning about the risks of pregnancy, or a failed abortion. In Canada, they will soon also involve product liability claims against negligent birth control manufacturers, providers and regulators. This article considers whether the parents' damages ought to include the cost of raising the child. No Canadian appellate court has ever ruled on this point, although it has been adjudicated extensively by the highest courts elsewhere in the common law world. At least 7 different rules limiting such recovery have been endorsed in the Canadian lower courts. Most of the limiting rules are unique to involuntary parenthood cases, deviating from the outcome that would prevail were the standard rules of negligence law applied. Many have no rational foundation. This article concludes that the failure to compensate parents for the cost of raising the child cannot be justified. Rather the refusal to compensate for reasonable child rearing expenses constitutes discrimination against parents, especially women who are mothers. This discrimination is sometimes, perhaps often, perpetrated by judges who refuse to accept and protect a woman's right to reproductive freedom. These mothers are under-compensated, and the medical establishment that failed them is under-deterred.
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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 | 0.003 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".