The role of normative ideologies of motherhood in intended mothers' experiences of egg donation in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores 18 infertile Canadian intended mothers' experiences using donor eggs to conceive. Their narratives reflect a persistent normative ideology of reproduction and motherhood in Canada, where reproduction is natural, and expected, mother and child are genetically related, and two (genetic) parent families are what is normal. These ideologies permeate intended mothers' experiences of infertility, and their relationship with their egg donor. Much of the intended mothers' grief over their infertility was attributable to the gap between their experience and their perceived sense of normality. While intended mothers' relationships with their egg donor varied across a 'relational spectrum', their desire to minimize the gap between their experience and normative motherhood resulted in many intended mothers choosing less inclusive relationships, to the left of the spectrum, so as to mentally distance themselves from their use of donor eggs. Ultimately, however, in choosing to pursue egg donation, and in normalizing a different understanding of motherhood for themselves, these intended mothers are influencing cultural practices in Canada. In the long run, they, and others like them, are likely to alter cultural attitudes and conceptions of 'normality' when it comes to reproduction and motherhood.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".