IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v51y2000i3p407-417.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Discounted lives? Weighing disability when measuring health and ruling on "compassionate" murder

Author

Listed:
  • Rock, Melanie

Abstract

This paper examines the politics of "suffering" by considering the Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY) alongside a controversial Canadian murder case, involving the killing of a child with disabilities by her father. The DALY aims to measure health and death correctly so as to allocate resources fairly, and eventually achieve better living conditions among the world's people. The Latimer controversy centres on the contention that some lives are not worth living, which the DALY's formula also implies. By ranking types of people according to their degree of disability, the DALY rates the lives of some people as worse than "a state equivalent to death". By examining the politics of "suffering" in the DALY and the Latimer affair, this paper underlines a valorisation of the "normal" body in much of the social science literature on health, medicine and suffering.

Suggested Citation

  • Rock, Melanie, 2000. "Discounted lives? Weighing disability when measuring health and ruling on "compassionate" murder," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 51(3), pages 407-417, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:51:y:2000:i:3:p:407-417
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(99)00473-6
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Arnesen, Trude & Kapiriri, Lydia, 2004. "Can the value choices in DALYs influence global priority-setting?," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 70(2), pages 137-149, November.
    2. Storeng, Katerini Tagmatarchi & Murray, Susan F. & Akoum, Mélanie S. & Ouattara, Fatoumata & Filippi, Véronique, 2010. "Beyond body counts: A qualitative study of lives and loss in Burkina Faso after 'near-miss' obstetric complications," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 71(10), pages 1749-1756, November.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:51:y:2000:i:3:p:407-417. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.