Belief-based denial of contraception and abortion care in Canada: A scoping review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although contraception and abortion are considered medically necessary services, providers in Canada are permitted to deny services and referrals on the basis of their personal beliefs or conscience. Belief-based denial, sometimes referred to as “conscientious objection,” remains a controversial issue leading to barriers to access and provision of care. We carried out a scoping review to explore what is currently known about the belief-based denial of contraception and abortion care in Canada. We used a predefined framework to search for relevant sources and found a total of 97 articles including 27 peer-reviewed articles, 47 media articles, and 23 articles from reproductive health organizations, published since 1990. The literature we found shows that policy has been a key area of discussion; sources also focus on conceptually defining belief-based denial and advocacy efforts for reproductive rights. There is a stark lack of peer-reviewed literature documenting and examining the impact of belief-based denial of contraception and abortion care on those denied care in Canada.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.050 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.013 | 0.023 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".