High-Tech Obstetrics, Colonialism, and Childbirth Choice in Late Twentieth-Century Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Developed in the United States in the late 1950s and 1960s, the electronic fetal monitor (EFM) was increasingly used in obstetric practice throughout North America by the 1970s. In identifying and delineating the "normal" fetal heart rate, EFM played a central role in defining obstetric risk and, in the eyes of many practitioners, quickly became an essential tool of "modern" and "safe" hospitalized birth. Focusing on one specific settler-colonial context, this article explores the relationship between obstetric technologies including the EFM and the childbirth "choices" available to mothers giving birth in late twentieth-century Canada. As smaller hospitals, health centers, and nursing stations, particularly in rural, remote, and northern areas, lacked access to what were framed as essential technologies, obstetric services were withdrawn from many communities, a shift that continues to disproportionately affect Indigenous mothers who are routinely evacuated out to give birth in provincial hospitals.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".