Surrogacy in Canada: Lawyers’ experiences, practices and perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores and critiques Canadian legal responses to surrogate motherhood. At the heart of this project is an empirical study (qualitative interviews) with twenty-six fertility lawyers in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. These interviews offer new insights on how and why surrogacy contracts are drafted and negotiated, on disputes that have arisen between surrogates and intended parents, and on how lawyers interpret, apply and view federal and provincial surrogacy laws. When compared with traditional narratives about surrogacy, lawyers’ stories provide a more nuanced and complex picture of power dynamics between surrogate mothers and intended parents. They indicate that while surrogates may be vulnerable in these arrangements, they may also exercise considerable agency and power. In addition, while Canadian laws aim to protect surrogates, to deter commercial arrangements, and to recognize family-building through surrogacy, lawyers’ narratives demonstrate that current laws do not fully support these objectives in practice. This thesis urges Canadian lawmakers and scholars to pay attention to lawyers’ experiences, practices and perspectives in considering how best to respond to surrogacy
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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 | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.054 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".