The Widening Concept of Parent in Canada: Step-Parents, Same-Sex Partners, & Parents by ART
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION-THE EVOLVING CONCEPT OF THE FAMILY IN CANADAThe social and legal concepts of in Canada have changed dramatically over the past half century. While opposite-sex married couples with children remain the most common form, the 2006 Census revealed that these families are no longer the majority.1 The divorce rate has risen dramatically over the past several decades, with more than one in three marriages now ending in divorce.2 Consequently, singleparent families, blended families, and step-families are now common, and there has been a substantial increase in the number of lone-parent families, though most (approximately 80%) remain headed by women.3 Also, the number of unmarried opposite-sex couples has been growing rapidly, rising from about 6% of all Census families in 1981 to 16% in 2006, and Canada now gives extensive legal recognition to non-marital cohabitation.4 Finally, over the past two decades there has been increasing legal and social acceptance of same-sex relationships. As a result of litigation in the late 1990s under section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the equality rights provision),5 the federal Parliament and provincial legislatures enacted legislation to recognize same-sex relationships as similar to non-marital opposite-sex relationships, and in 2005, Canada became the third country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. About one in six of the same-sex couples identified in the 2006 Census were married, with the rest living in non-marital relationships.6Like family and spouse, the concept of has also been transformed. In the latter part of the twentieth century, the legal concept of illegitimacy was abolished and Canada gave legal recognition to psychological parents, beginning with step-parents in traditional oppositesex marriages. More recently, the concept of parenthood has been broadened to reflect the surge in the use of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) by both homosexual and heterosexual couples to conceive children.7 It is this changing definition of parent in Canada- with a particular focus on some of the issues raised by ARTs-that is the subject of this Article.Our central theme is that, consistent with the relatively expansive concept of spouse, in comparison to many other countries, Canadian legislatures and courts have developed a relatively broad and child-focused approach to the concept of parent, one that recognizes the importance of social and psychological parents and now includes the same-sex partners of lesbian biological mothers. However, Canadian law has not fully kept pace with technological and social change, and there is a need for statutory reform to better address the issues that are raised by the growing use and sophistication of ARTs.8 Many questions related to ARTs have been leftfor judges to resolve, or for lawyers to attempt to provide advice to clients, in the absence of clear legislation or binding precedent. Further, present laws significantly restrict the use of surrogacy agreements and payments to gamete donors; while facially neutral, these laws have a disproportionate impact on same-sex partners, especially lesbians.This Article surveys some of the salient issues and controversies related to the establishment of parent-child relationships in Canada, with a particular focus on questions related to ARTs and same-sex parenting. Given the complexity of these issues as well as space limitations, this Article does not provide a detailed review of all of the relevant Canadian case law and statutes, but rather, identifies central themes and discusses particular jurisprudence and legislation that may serve as useful precedents for other countries.Part I of this Article examines the traditional legal bases for establishing legal parentage, beginning with the historical legal presumptions which privileged biology and marriage when ordering and sanctioning relationships. …
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".