Citation

Buchbinder M. Materials (Basel) 2019; 6(1): 5-29.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.17157/MAT.6.1.645

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article examines an ethical controversy that has received relatively little attention in public debates about the legalization of medical aid-in-dying (AID): should physicians inform patients that they have the option of hastening death? Drawing on ethnographic research about the implementation of AID in Vermont, I argue that how we understand the moral stakes of this debate depends on divergent views regarding language use in social interactions. Some stakeholders in this debate view a physician's words as powerful enough to damage the patient-physician relationship or to influence a patient to hasten her death, while others believe that merely informing patients about AID cannot move them to act against their own values and preferences. I illustrate how these divergent perspectives are tied to competing language ideologies regarding clinical disclosure, which I call 'disclosure ideologies'. My analysis of these two disclosure ideologies surrounding AID highlights disclosure practices in medicine as a rich site for medical anthropological theorizing on linguistic performativity and the social power of clinical language. © 2019, MDPI. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

United States; Disclosure; Assisted suicide; Medicine; Vermont; Performativity; Social interactions; Assisted dying; Medical aid-in-dying; Clinical communication; Language ideologies; Materials; Public debate