The Supreme Court of Canada and What It Means To Be “Of Woman Born"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this chapter, I look for connections between Adrienne Rich’s reflections on motherhood and recent jurisprudence on intervention in pregnancy. Given that “[w]e place law in a very privileged position” (Smart 111), in order to fully understand the ways in which Of Woman Born has influenced thinking about motherhood and pregnancy, it is necessary to consider the extent to which Rich’s perceptions are reflected within current legal thinking. For the purposes of this discussion, I focus on two decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada: Winnipeg Child and Family Services v. G. (1997) and Dobson (Litigation Guardian of ) v. Dobson (1999). In Winnipeg Child and Family Services, the majority of the court held that it did not have the authority to confine a pregnant woman to an addiction treatment center, while in Dobson the majority refused to allow a child to sue his mother for harms allegedly caused by her negligence during pregnancy. While not all the issues canvassed in Of Woman Born are relevant to my topic, certain aspects of Rich’s commentary on motherhood provide a useful perspective on both the majority and dissenting opinions in Winnipeg Child and Family Services and Dobson. In particular, the following themes from Of Woman Born reverberate, in one way or another, in these judgments: Rich’s analysis of the control that a patriarchal society exerts over women as they bear and rear children; her observation that society makes mothers almost entirely responsible for meeting the needs of children; her critique of society’s tendency either to idolize or despise women; and her attempts to find new ways of describing the nature of pregnancy. The connections that can be drawn between themes from Of Woman Born and jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Canada are a testament to the impact that the writings of Rich and other feminists have had on the way in which motherhood and pregnancy are conceptualized.
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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 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.052 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".