Disassembling the Liberal Feminist Legacy of Reproductive Rights in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates the historical and contemporary exclusions embedded in Canadian reproductive rights discourse through an institutional ethnographic analysis of scholarly literature and state policies on reproduction. We critically engage with the liberal feminist framing of “choice” and “responsible parenthood,” showing how these concepts have historically operated through settler colonial, racial, and cisnormative logics. Drawing on scholarship in Indigenous feminism, Black feminist thought, and trans and queer theory, we trace how reproductive policies in Canada—from eugenics and family planning to abortion access and legal recognition—have systematically marginalized Indigenous, Black, disabled, Two-Spirit, queer and trans people. We argue for a queer, decolonial reproductive justice framework that centers bodily autonomy, community care, and relational accountability beyond liberal legal rights. Informed by institutional ethnography, this article maps how texts, policies, and professional discourses coordinate systemic reproductive oppression while also illuminating activist knowledge and resistance practices that chart a transformative path forward.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.052 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".