The Multiplicity of Abortion Pills: Considering the Public Constructions of ru486 in Sweden
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract To this day, abortion pills are a contentious technology – used freely and legally in some countries while prohibited in others. Previous scholarship has shown abortion pills to be difficult to integrate into medical systems. Available since the early 1990s, little has been written on the early adoption of abortion pills in Sweden, one of the first countries to register the compound ru486 for use. This is remarkable if we consider what is at stake when introducing new abortion technologies – namely, the conditions for gender equality and the very tangible implications for maternal health. This article examines the Swedish process of acquiring ru486: mapping the varied actors invested in its use, and analysing the different constructions of abortion pills that were made in these networks. It argues that earlier reproductive research initiatives and their extensive press coverage helped to make registration possible for ru486 in the early 1990s. Comparisons between the constructions of ru486 in Canada and the U.S. illustrate a few key differences between the countries and show why, despite many similarities, Sweden was the first to officially acquire the drug.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| 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".