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 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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".