Canadian Journal of Sociology Online March-April 2007 Victory! At What Cost? The Implications of Professionalizing Midwifery in Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Until 1993, when midwifery was made a profession in Ontario, Canada was the only industrialized country that did not recognize midwifery (Bourgeault 1999). Save for a few small religious, remote and Aboriginal communities it was rare that a woman in Canada gave birth anywhere other than a hospital attended by a physician. However, in the 1970s a tiny but growing movement of women sought and took control of their birth experiences by choosing to give birth in their own homes with the assistance of friends. These friends were self-taught midwives whose approach to pregnancy and childbirth was very different than those of their medical counterparts. Unlike physicians who are taught that birth is normal after the fact, midwives treat birth as a normal natural event and see labouring women as their own birth experts. This social movement was taking shape across the country, but it was in Ontario where these lay-trained midwives were the first to make it across the professional finish line. Two new books reflect on this Canadian first and assess its implications for midwifery and for sociological examination of professions. In the aptly titled Push!, Ivy Lynne Bourgeault documents the long, arduous struggle to professionalize midwifery in Ontario. However, Push! is more than just a chronicle of the painstaking steps taken to integrate midwifery into the provincial healthcare system. It also captures
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.058 | 0.004 |
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".