Discourses on the pregnant body in Canadian constitutional law : a post-structuralist and anthropological analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pregnancy has theoretical and political import because it is sexual difference made visible and because it is marked by historical, social, political, and cultural contexts.The ever-increasing availability and use of reproductive and genetic technologies affect popular, theoretical, and legal conceptions of the pregnant body.Two decisions rendered by the Supreme Court of Canada, namely Dobson u Dobson (1999) and llinnipeg Child and Family Services (Northwest Area) v. D. (F.G.) (1997), were read deconstructively to analyze legal discourses on the pregnant body.These legal discourses represented the pregnant body through an individualistic model of liberal subjectivity.This thesis argues that the pregnant body is presented in these discourses as both a container (a legal person who stores the foetus) and as contained (the pregnant body as an untouched and bordered whole).These representations of pregnancy naturalize and privilege the contained liberal legal subject instead of exploring the multiplicity of pregnancy and thus recontextualizing and reworking the legal discourses on pregnancy.Pregnant subjectivity is examined through these Supreme Court decisions which deal with the legal relationship between the pregnant women and the foetus, the legal status of the foetus, the behaviour of the pregnant woman, judicial intervention in pregnancy, and the discourses of legal personality, property, and bodily integrity.The theoretical paradigm or framework for this analysis was a feminist post- structuralist approach that presumed the importance of gender in social relations and emphasized problems in representing lived experience through language, specifically through legal discourse.These Supreme Court of Canada decisions were read input.The women I worked with at the Canadian Women's Health Network deserve a special expression of thanks.Their dedication, acumen, and most importantly, their humour in their work to keep women's voices heard kept me inspired and motivated throughout the writing of this thesis.Their collective wisdom (and our lunchroom banter) was always astute and invigorating.My greatest thanks are reserved for my family and my partner for their steadfast encouragement, support, and patience.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| 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".