“An Oasis in the Desert:” Dr. Garson Romalis and the Struggle to Maintain Access to Abortion in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dr. Garson Romalis (1937-2014) was an obstetrician, gynaecologist and abortion provider in Vancouver, British Columbia. Like other abortion providers in North America, Romalis, his family and his clinic were subjected to years of harassment by pro-life activists. In 1994, Romalis was shot in his home by an anti-abortion terrorist and in 2000, he was stabbed by another terrorist outside of his clinic. Yet Romalis continued to provide this legal and essential medical procedure to British Columbian women, and advocated for the education of more abortion providers. This study will discuss the life and contributions of Gary Romalis and outline the motivations of the man to continue this dangerous work. It will compare his experiences with that of the more famous Canadian abortion provider, Dr. Henry Morgentaler, and speculate upon the significance of the Jewish ideal of tikkun olam (to heal the world) in these men’s lifework. Abortion terrorism will be situated within the constellation of pro-life activities, the goal of which is the curtailment of access to abortion in Canada.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.053 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".