Elyse Ona Singer

Bio

Elyse Ona Singer is a cultural and medical anthropologist who studies how people grapple with ethically extreme decisions about life and death. Her work explores bioethical quandaries about when life begins and ends and who is authorized to draw these boundaries. She engages hard individual, communal, and societal questions such as: who has ownership over the body? What makes a person? And, who bears responsibility for nascent and depleted human life? These interests have animated Singer's major ethnographic projects in Mexico on abortion politics and end-of-life care. The first project resulted in an award-winning book, Lawful Sins: Abortion Rights and Reproductive Governance in Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2022). With timely insights on global struggles for reproductive justice in the post-Roe era, Lawful Sins reorients prevailing perspectives that approach abortion rights as a hallmark of women’s citizenship in liberal societies. Her current book project, How it Ends: Death and the Struggle for Dignity in Mexico, follows ordinary Mexican families as they navigate the dying process and a world of palliative care wards, funeral homes, and burial grounds. Approaching death as a social process, the book traces the agonizing decisions that confront dying patients, family members, and providers, as well as the occupational and moral worlds of those who prepare and handle the deceased.

Research Interests

Reproductive Politics • Bioethics • Death and Dying • Medical Anthropology • Mexico

Courses Taught

Health, Healing and Ethics • Advanced Seminar in Ethnology: Bioethics