Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sally Monroe had tried repeatedly, but after three boys she despaired at ever achieving her dream of having a girl. She stayed in bed and cried for weeks. She changed assignments in the hospital where she worked as a nurse so that she would not have to be around newborns. Perhaps her focus on a girl was due to her having grown up in a family of four girls and the fond memories she had of playing with her sisters. As a Canadian she could not receive gender selection fertility services so she had to seek them in the US. Her first effort at sperm sorting in a Michigan clinic failed and a boy resulted. She had known a boy had been conceived because of an ultrasound test result. She could have resorted to abortion at that point, which desperate parents sometimes did if the gender was not the one desired. But she opted to have the baby boy. Then she heard of various clinics in the US that practically guaranteed the ability to select the desired gender if she and her husband could produce a girl embryo. A patient produced embryos and through preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) the desired gender was selected. Sally struggled with the dilemma and spoke to her husband (Sidhu, 2012). Could they afford the $15,000 fee and all the travel related expenses? They had already tried PGD once in California and none of the resulting embryos were girls. Should they try again? The total cost would climb to around $40,000 with the new attempt. Furthermore, since the practice was viewed as illegal in Canada, where she lived, should she go through with it? Was it ethical for her to avoid the law by getting it done in the US? Ethical Approaches Sex selection technologies and practice offered excellent opportunities for society to contemplate the importance of developing ethical frameworks to aid in the evaluation of what may be right or wrong, particularly in areas where science introduces new choices in how to live the best sort of life. In the course of developing appreciation of how ethical theories contributed to understanding, through application to specific problems, people should also have recognized critical interrelationships among scientific advances, ethical outlooks, and the evolution of law. Science was advancing rapidly, and national and international interest in PGD indicated that the medical profession and the public were becoming increasingly engaged and outspoken about many concerns, including social justice. Professional societies in the health professions could have exerted influence through their ethical positions. The law, public policies and public opinion also shaped public debate on issues such as gender selection. Several philosophical perspectives could have been considered by people looking at gender selection: * From the utilitarian perspective of maximizing happiness while minimizing harm one might conclude that the satisfaction of parents through family balancing could justify gender selection. * In terms of consequentialism, where the achievement of successful outcomes was considered, one would have had to consider the impact gender imbalance could have had on society. * Value based approaches emphasized that virtue and doing what was right were the primary concerns. Permitting gender selection through PGD was based on the logic that regulatory prohibition of gender selection based on either political or ethical considerations would have impacted freedom of choice; curtailed technological development; prevented shaping of opinions from experience of choice; and the result of political will or organizational leadership may not have been representative of society. However, many governments found that gender selection was ethically wrong and therefore illegal. A side effect of banning gender selection through PGD was that desperate parents would achieve gender selection through abortion. Abortion and Gender Selection The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists clearly stated its opposition to sex selection (ACOG, February 2007) through abortion. …
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
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".