Mara Buchbinder, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Social Medicine and Center for Bioethics
University of North Carolina
Abstract: Over the past five years, medical aid-in-dying has expanded rapidly in the United States and may now be legally available to one in five Americans. This growing social and political movement heralds the possibility of a new era of choice in dying. Yet very little is publicly known about how medical aid-in-dying laws affect ordinary citizens once they are put into practice. In this talk, Dr. Buchbinder will present findings from her ethnographic research documenting the implementation of Vermont’s 2013 Patient Choice and Control at End of Life Act, which show that medical aid-in-dying enables some terminally ill people to exercise agency over death against a backdrop of existential uncertainty, bureaucratic regulation, and the biomedicalization of end-of-life care. However, this opportunity to “script” one’s death is not evenly distributed but instead favors individuals from more privileged socioeconomic backgrounds.
View online here.
Sponsored by the Association for Study of Death and Society
Location and Address
Online