How the legalization of assisted dying is changing our lives.
Over the past five years, medical aid-in-dying (also known as assisted suicide) has expanded rapidly in the United States and is now 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. Sociological studies of new health policies have repeatedly demonstrated that the realities often fall short of advocacy visions, raising questions about how much choice and control aid-in-dying actually affords.
Scripting Death chronicles two years of ethnographic research documenting the implementation of Vermont’s 2013 Patient Choice and Control at End of Life Act. Author Mara Buchbinder weaves together stories collected from patients, caregivers, health care providers, activists, and legislators to illustrate how they navigate aid-in-dying as a new medical frontier in the aftermath of legalization. Scripting Death explains how medical aid-in-dying works, what motivates people to pursue it, and ultimately, why upholding the “right to die” is very different from ensuring access to this life-ending procedure. This unprecedented, in-depth account uses the case of assisted death as an entry point into ongoing cultural conversations about the changing landscape of death and dying in the United States.
Mara Buchbinder is Associate Professor of Social Medicine and Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is author of All in Your Head: Making Sense of Pediatric Pain and coauthor of Saving Babies? The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening.
"Mara Buchbinder's rich description of the law, bureaucracy, and the hurdles to scripting physician aid-in-dying provides an eye-opening, sometimes disturbing answer to the question of how we can foster health care justice when it comes to assisted dying. Costs, access, community, the burden of time, and the pragmatics of choice loom large here. A provocative, necessary book."––Sharon R. Kaufman, author of Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives, and Where to Draw the Line
"This marvelous, unsettling book documents how a new law on assisted dying gets translated into practice. With sensitivity and nuance, Buchbinder describes the new forms of exclusion as well as sociality that this 'aspirational death' has created, and the dilemmas for physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and others involved."––Janelle S. Taylor, Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto
"The trained eye of an ethnographer sees things ordinary observers don't, and the trained eye of an ethnographer committed to careful neutrality is particularly valuable. Partisans on both sides of the debate over medical aid-in-dying should read this perceptive and informative book: it will enhance the vision of all."––Margaret Pabst Battin, author of The Least Worst Death: Essays in Bioethics on the End of Life
248 pp.6 x 9
9780520425194$24.95|£21.00Paper
Aug 2025