Bibliographic record
Abstract
Surrogacy is increasingly prevalent, particularly in Canada where despite its long status as a legally permitted practice it is only permissible through ‘altruistic’ arrangements as it is illegal to pay a surrogate to carry a child. This unpaid labour performed by Canadian surrogates transforms the dystopian perception of commercial surrogacy into a utopian vision of community welfare. This vision persists amid a major contradiction in Canada’s legal framework of altruistic surrogacy: while paying surrogates is criminally prohibited, paying for-profit surrogacy agents, lawyers, and clinics remains legal as does Canadian participation in highly stratified commercial surrogacy markets abroad. This thesis explores the value of Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘ideological struggle’ for examining these complex and sometimes contradictory representations of altruistic surrogacy in Canada. I argue that surrogacy is both a site that contests and constructs normative ideologies of reproduction and motherhood in ways that struggle to reconcile or at least displace the potentially problematic politics of commercial third parties profiting off the altruistic exchange of others. In this thesis, I draw upon legal and policy documents, newspapers, a documentary, and the websites of surrogacy agencies. I triangulate this original empirical data with a series of interviews to offer new insights on how legislative ambiguities and everyday ambivalences among Canadians towards the unpaid nature of surrogacy combine to naturalize a contested process and foreclose critique. This work proposes thinking of Canadian surrogacy as an ideological struggle to highlight the public and private resources that make the altruistic model possible and reveals routes of rethinking it in these terms
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.063 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| 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".