Angela Campbell

Bountiful’s Plural Marriages

Bountiful, British Columbia is Canada’s only openly polygamous community. Public discussions about Bountiful suggest that the only form of marriage practiced there is polygamous, and that this is usually harmful to women and children. This paper suggests that this monolithic representation of marriage in Bountiful misses the conjugal pluralism that exists in this community. Part I sets out the typical portrayal of marriage in Bountiful offered by Canadian public and political discussions. Part II contrasts this portrayal with five stories about marriage in Bountiful that the author observed or was told about while conducting field research. These stories indicate that conjugal heterogeneity is both existent and accepted in Bountiful. They also suggest that, in becoming and being a wife in Bountiful, women can experience varying degrees of choice and agency. All of this is relevant to exploring how a fuller recognition of the conjugal diversity and choices that may exist in a place like Bountiful might affect formal juridical approaches to polygamy.

Harmonizing the International Regulation of Embryonic Stem Cell Research: Possibilities, Promises and Potential Pitfalls

Despite near unanimous global opposition to human reproductive cloning, the United Nations has been unable to reach a consensus as to how cloning practices should be regulated at the international level. As a result, the U.N. objective of establishing binding international regulations governing cloning and stem cell research has yet to be achieved. Given the lack of consensus that exists within the global community on this topic, it seems that any attempt to harmonize the international regulation of cloning and stem cell science will face important obstacles. This paper seeks to illuminate the particular challenges to harmonizing international laws and policies related to stem cell research and human cloning, and to investigate potential methods for overcoming these challenges. By drawing on two other areas in which regulatory harmonization has been attempted, namely: environmental and human safety aspects of international trade, and pharmaceutical research and development, we study approaches to global regulatory harmonization. We conclude that while the challenges to harmonization are diverse and important, so too are the benefits of establishing uniformity in approaches to stem cell research worldwide. This paper proposes a model for harmonizing the regulation of stem cell research that focuses on broader norms and principles rather than specific rules. It further recommends that such harmonization should occur through a process initiated and developed by an independent international agency marked by diversity, both in terms of the cultural identities and perspectives represented, and the interdisciplinary expertise of its members.

Women and (their) children: wrongs, rights and relationships

ABSTRACT As of the turn of the twenty-first century, a pregnant woman appears to be excluded from the Canadian private law of civil wrongs when it comes to any wrongfully inflicted harm on her own foetus. This article revisits and examines the images of pregnancy and maternity represented in the judgments in Dobson v. Dobson, a 1999 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada. Against the backdrop of contemporary discussions about surrogacy, the images put forth in Dobson – namely, the expecting woman, the autonomous woman and the woman as mother – represent more generally the co-existing and often entangled pictures with which the law grapples whenever pregnancy and maternity are at stake. This essay explores how we might imagine a more child-focused reflection of issues like those presented in Dobson. Without insisting on the applicability of children’s rights as set out in conventions or charters, it is possible to include the interests and perspective of children in a nuanced analysis of law’s engagement with pregnancy and maternity that does not compromise or erode women’s rights or interests. Indeed, a recognition of children’s interests in this context permits a juridical recognition of, and reconciling with, the complex and diverse realities of pregnancy and maternity.

Wives’ Tales on Research in Bountiful

This chapter develops research strategies designed to access and record the narratives of women within a plural marriage society, with a view to enhancing legal and popular knowledge about polygamy in Canada. It achieves this end through reliance on scholarship that explores methods for conducting reflexive research from a feminist viewpoint. Two particular research strategies explored in the feminist scholarship are considered here with particular reference to Bountiful, British Columbia, a community where plural marriage is openly practised. These strategies require the researcher to (1) hear and give credence to the narratives of women regarding their experiences as polygamous wives; and (2) engage in critical self-reflection about her own cultural and normative reference points and assumptions. These strategies are relied on to formulate a distinctly juridical inquiry that rejects any presumed preference of state over cultural “law” while at the same time rigourously testing claims about gender and tradition grounded in cultural norms. Applying this inquiry to the study of polygamy in Bountiful, British Columbia, should serve to enrich our understanding of how women are affected by plural marriage, and by law’s response to this practice.