Abortion Anarchy? The Case for Abortion Decriminalization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For most of the last 35 years, Canada has stood alone as a global exception to the criminalization of abortion. Following the 1988 Supreme Court decision in R. v. Morgentaler, which deemed the existing federal abortion law unconstitutional, Canada has operated without criminal restrictions on abortion. Despite the distinctive nature of Canada's approach, there is a dearth of scholarly work that has explicitly traced the process through which abortion decriminalization materialized and offered an in-depth examination of its effectiveness. This paper aims to address this gap in two ways. First, it traces the process through which abortion decriminalization emerged in Canada, which resulted from a combination of context-specific circumstances and sociopolitical factors. Second, it argues that while Canada's pathway to abortion decriminalization is distinct and may not be directly transferable to other contexts, there are nonetheless insights to be drawn from the Canadian experience. The promise of abortion decriminalization, as both a governance and advocacy framework, lies in its efficacy, its ability to navigate constraints of the law, and its strategic and symbolic advantages.
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".