Divine Intervention: Catholicism, Abortion, and the Construction of Health Care in the United States and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The United States and Canadian Conferences of Catholic Bishops chose opposite strategies of either confrontation or cooperation when their respective countries expanded abortion rights, despite their identical institutional philosophies. This paper theorizes the Conferences’ strategic divergence as a response to partisan cues during debates over contraception and abortion access in the 1960s and 1970s. In the United States, abortion rights debates coincided with the collapse of the New Deal Coalition. The Republican Party responded to increased electoral competition by adopting an antiabortion position to court Catholic voters. This strategy invited bishops to take an uncompromising stance against expanded abortion access. In contrast, Canada debated decriminalizing abortion when the Liberal Party dominated electoral politics and supported increased access. The Liberals were thus unwilling to adjust their position, so the bishops had no incentive to be confrontational. The effect of these differences lingers to the present and complicates efforts to expand public health insurance due to its link to contraceptive and abortion access. Further, the analysis demonstrates that party cues are an under-explored variable in developmental stories of religious institutions’ political positions and reveals a tendency for health expansions to revolve around the availability of reproductive care.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".