M Buchbinder
Biographic Data
| ID | 13447 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Buchbinder |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Buchbinder |
| SIGNATURE | BUCHBINDER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2319-662X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 299 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
“I Feel Like there’s a Politician in the Room”
State-level abortion bans enacted after Dobbs v. Jackson may have a deleterious impact on the health of women and may increase maternal morbidity and mortality. In obstetrics-gynecology, strong patient–physician relationships, which are built via patient-centered care strategies, are associated with better pregnancy-related outcomes. Abortion bans may limit physicians’ ability to utilize these strategies by restricting care that can legally be pr…
The Third Person in the Room
Since the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the popular media has been flooded with stories about pregnant patients experiencing obstetric complications who were denied access to necessary abortion care and suffered tragic consequences. Yet some of the lesser‐told relevant stories include far subtler impacts on the patient‐physician relationship. In this commentary, I reflect on interviews that my team…
Living in the Shadow of Uncertainty
Cancer mortality has experienced a sharp decline over the past three decades. This transformation, due mostly to biomedical breakthroughs and novel therapies, raises the key question of Gluck's An Exercise in Uncertainty: A Memoir of Illness and Hope: what is it like to live in a state of chronic, existential uncertainty? In answering this question, the book subverts traditional prototypes of contemporary cancer memoirs and offers instructive ins…
Assessing the Effect of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Abortion Care Utilization and Delays and Whether There Was a Differential Impact Among Latinas in North Carolina
The COVID-19 pandemic was associated with an increase in monthly abortion counts through 2021 and a decrease in the proportion of abortions after the first trimester at the pandemic's onset
Medical uncertainty in the shadow of Dobbs
Recent changes to United States medical practice following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v Jackson Woman's Health Organization have led to new forms of medical uncertainty arising from the interpretation and implementation of state law. Post-Dobbs legal restrictions are particularly challenging because they entail multiple forms of uncertainty that intensify when combined, with risks to pregnant patients and to the clinicians who car…
Reproductive Healthcare After Dobbs
The obstetric violence framework proposes that clinicians harm pregnant people through physical and psychological mistreatment and violations of autonomy. In this article, we analyze interviews with 54 obstetrician-gynecologists (OB-GYNs) practicing in US states with near-total abortion bans to show how similar harms may also be performed through actions of the state. Reframing obstetric harm to include the behind-the-scenes work of state legisla…
Forces to Be Reckoned with
The 'countervailing powers' framework conceptualizes health care as an arena for power contests among key stakeholders, drawing attention to the moves, countermoves, and alliances that have challenged physicians' dominance since the 1970s. Here, we focus on one of the lesser known micro-level consequences of such forces for physicians: emotional distress. We draw on 145 interviews with frontline physicians across four U.S. cities during the COVID…
Beyond coercion
This essay considers how we are to understand the decision to end one’s life under medical aid-in-dying (MAID) statutes and the role of influencing others. Bioethical concerns about the potential for abuse in MAID have focused predominantly on the risk of coercion and other forms of undue influence. Most bioethical analyses of relational influences in MAID have been made by opponents of MAID, who argue that MAID is unethical, in part, because it …
Sources of moral distress among obstetrician-gynecologists after Dobbs
Since the US Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, 18 states have enacted functional bans on abortion, yet little is known about how these laws contribute to workplace stress and its sequelae among clinicians. The purpose of this study was to characterize sources of moral distress—which occurs when a clinician knows the right course of clinical action but is barred from taking that action by external constr…
Opening the Door
This essay looks closely at metaphors and other figures of speech that often feature in how Americans talk about dementia, becoming part of cultural narratives: shared stories that convey ideas and values, and also worries and fears. It uses approaches from literary studies to analyze how cultural narratives about dementia may surface in conversations with family members or health care professionals. This essay also draws on research on a notable…
Choice in the Context of Dementia
This introduction to the special report “Facing Dementia: Clarifying End‐of‐Life Choices, Supporting Better Lives” explains why focused attention to dementia is needed in bioethics and in health care practice in a range of settings. It explains how this strongly age‐associated condition shapes individual lives over years, revealing inequities in how dementia care is financed. The introduction explains the structure of the report, which consists o…
Physicians' Explanatory Models of Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease
Explanatory models are culturally informed representations of illness that convey understandings of the etiology and expected course of disease. Substantial research has explored lay explanatory models, but examining physicians' clinical explanatory models can also provide insight into patients' understandings of illness because physicians are a foundational source of authoritative knowledge that shapes lay concepts of illness and disease. This s…
Medical Aid in Dying
Medical aid in dying (MAID) has been a productive target for social scientific inquiry at the intersections of law and medicine over the past two decades. Insofar as MAID crystallizes and reflects personal and cultural understandings of key concepts such as individualism, dependency, dignity, and care, it is a rich site for social scientific theorizing. This article reviews and assesses the contributions of social scientific perspectives to resea…
Narratives of prevention and redemption in opioid overdose obituaries
Obituaries of people who died from an opioid overdose represent a new territory for understanding cultural narratives of the US opioid epidemic. Drawing on textual analysis of 30 opioid overdose obituaries published on Legacy.com between 2015 and 2020, we describe a prototypical narrative conveyed through opioid overdose obituaries, which renders symbolic meaning through the voices of the bereaved. Obituary authors reimagine their subjects as tra…
Dirty Work in Medicine
Physicians who participate in abortion and medically assisted death in the United States work at the margins of institutionalized medicine. What motivates them to engage in such “dirty work”? This article uses ethnographic materials from two recent projects to analyze physicians’ roles as gatekeepers to contested medical services. Abortion and medically assisted death share many similarities: They are both deeply stigmatized practices that are he…
Society for Medical Anthropology Statement on Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Decision
This statement summarizes key findings from anthropological and related scholarship on the harmful consequences of inadequate abortion access, leading the Society for Medical Anthropology to register profound concern about the recent Supreme Court decision inDobbs v. Jackson. After circulation to SMA members for input, a finalized version passed a membership vote by an overwhelming margin. This statement complements one produced by the Council fo…
Expert stakeholders’ perspectives on a Data-to-Care strategy for improving care among HIV-positive individuals incarcerated in jails
Data-to-Care (D2C) uses surveillance data (e.g., laboratory, Medicaid billing) to identify out-of-care HIV-positive persons to re-link them to care. Most US states are implementing D2C, yet few studies have explored stakeholders' perspectives on D2C, and none have addressed these perspectives in the context of D2C in jail. This article reports findings from qualitative, semi-structured interviews conducted with expert stakeholders regarding their…
The power of suggestion
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 interac…
On Talking Together about Ordinary Abortion
The scarlet “A” that the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's seventeenth‐century novel is forced to pin to her dress symbolizes the shame and social disgrace that she endures for conceiving a child out of adultery. In Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law, & Politics of Ordinary Abortion, Katie Watson argues that abortion is our era's scarlet letter: a mark of stigma that is invisible yet no less shameful, causing unnecessary cultural silences around what …
Choreographing Death
This article draws on ethnographic research on the implementation of Vermont's 2013 medical aid-in-dying (AID) law to explore a fundamental paradox: While public discourse characterizes AID as a mechanism for achieving an individually controlled autonomous death, the medico-legal framework that organizes it enlists social support and cultivates dependencies. Therefore, while patients pursuing AID may avoid certain types of dependency-such as thos…
Down’s syndrome screening and reproductive politics
Sociological studies of screening may lead us to presume that screening is only consequential when a positive result is obtained. Yet Gareth Thomas’s Down’s Syndrome Screening and Reproductive Poli
Keeping out and getting in
Sociologists have tended to frame medical gatekeeping as an exclusionary social practice, delineating how practitioners and clerical staff police the moral boundaries of medicine by keeping out patients who are categorised as 'bad', 'deviant', or otherwise problematic. Yet medical gatekeeping, understood more broadly, can include not only keeping patients out of particular clinical settings, but also redirecting them to alternative sources of car…
Reframing Conscientious Care
“It's almost like putting salt in a wound, for this person who's already made a very difficult decision,” suggested Meghan Patterson (an alias), a licensed obstetrician‐gynecologist whom we interviewed in our qualitative study of the experiences of North Carolina abortion providers practicing under the state's Woman's Right to Know Act (House Bill 854; 2011). The act requires that women receive counseling with state‐mandated information at least …
Abortion providers, professional identity, and restrictive laws
Most studies on the impact of restrictive abortion laws have focused on patient-level outcomes. To better understand how such laws affect providers, we conducted a qualitative study of 27 abortion providers working under a restrictive law in North Carolina. Providers derived professional identity from their motivations, values, and experiences of pride related to abortion provision. The law affected their professional identities by perpetuating n…
Scripting Dissent
Abortion laws offer a point of entry for "the state" to intervene in intimate clinical matters. In this article, I explore the various uses of scripts and scripting in state-mandated abortion counseling following the implementation of North Carolina's (2011) Woman's "Right to Know" Act. The law mandates that women receive counseling with specific, state-prescribed information at least 24 hours prior to an abortion. Drawing on interviews with abor…
Patients-in-Waiting
What are the social consequences of the recent expansion of newborn screening in the United States? The adoption of new screening technologies has generated diagnostic uncertainty about the nature of screening targets, making it unclear not only whether a newborn will develop a disease but also what the condition actually is. Based on observations in a genetics clinic and in-depth interviews with parents and geneticists, we examine how parents an…
Community-based participatory research (CBPR) in South Africa
Personhood Diagnostics
This article examines an explanation circulating within a U.S. multidisciplinary pediatric pain clinic that links the neurobiology of functional pain disorders to desirable personal attributes such as smartness and creativity. Drawing on ethnographic observations and the analysis of video-recorded clinical interactions and focusing on two cases, I introduce the term personhood diagnostics to explore how the explanatory framework worked not only t…
Choreographing Death
This article draws on ethnographic research on the implementation of Vermont's 2013 medical aid-in-dying (AID) law to explore a fundamental paradox: While public discourse characterizes AID as a mechanism for achieving an individually controlled autonomous death, the medico-legal framework that organizes it enlists social support and cultivates dependencies. Therefore, while patients pursuing AID may avoid certain types of dependency-such as thos…
Scripting Dissent
Abortion laws offer a point of entry for "the state" to intervene in intimate clinical matters. In this article, I explore the various uses of scripts and scripting in state-mandated abortion counseling following the implementation of North Carolina's (2011) Woman's "Right to Know" Act. The law mandates that women receive counseling with specific, state-prescribed information at least 24 hours prior to an abortion. Drawing on interviews with abor…
Keeping out and getting in
Sociologists have tended to frame medical gatekeeping as an exclusionary social practice, delineating how practitioners and clerical staff police the moral boundaries of medicine by keeping out patients who are categorised as 'bad', 'deviant', or otherwise problematic. Yet medical gatekeeping, understood more broadly, can include not only keeping patients out of particular clinical settings, but also redirecting them to alternative sources of car…
Medical Technologies and the Dream of the Perfect Newborn
Feminist and disability scholars have critiqued the role of prenatal testing technologies in fostering parental expectations to give birth to "perfect" children. However, in the case of postnatal screening for genetic disorders, identifying large numbers of asymptomatic infants brings previously hidden imperfections into critical relief. Consequently, newborn screening technologies have altered the day-to-day landscape of early childrearing and d…
Expanded newborn screening
Population screening follows the logic of secondary prevention: a population is screened to detect disease early and to initiate treatment before symptoms emerge. However, not all population screening is justifiable under all circumstances. In this article, we unpack Wilson and Jungner's requirement that knowledge about the natural history of a disease must be 'adequate' for screening to proceed. We argue that any prior understanding of disease i…
Potentializing Newborn Screening
Virtually all 4.25 million babies born annually in the United States are screened for more than 50 rare genetic conditions. In a country plagued with widespread health-service access problems, this remarkable public health achievement depends on policy visions of newborn screening as the linchpin of secondary prevention and saving children's lives. Based on ethnographic research and drawing from a semiotic framework, we illustrate that newborn sc…
Sticky” Brains and Sticky Encounters in a U.S. Pediatric Pain Clinic
Neural imaginaries and clinical epistemology
You're still sick!' Framing, footing, and participation in children's medical play
Building on foundational work in activity theory and cultural psychology, this article examines children's play to discern how biomedical practices and understandings of illness are negotiated, modeled, and reproduced among children dealing with a parent's cancer. Using discourse analytic methods, I analyze a videotaped playroom interaction involving three preschool-age girls, all of whom have a parent with cancer, and myself. The article employs…
Society for Medical Anthropology Statement on Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Decision
This statement summarizes key findings from anthropological and related scholarship on the harmful consequences of inadequate abortion access, leading the Society for Medical Anthropology to register profound concern about the recent Supreme Court decision inDobbs v. Jackson. After circulation to SMA members for input, a finalized version passed a membership vote by an overwhelming margin. This statement complements one produced by the Council fo…
Dirty Work in Medicine
Physicians who participate in abortion and medically assisted death in the United States work at the margins of institutionalized medicine. What motivates them to engage in such “dirty work”? This article uses ethnographic materials from two recent projects to analyze physicians’ roles as gatekeepers to contested medical services. Abortion and medically assisted death share many similarities: They are both deeply stigmatized practices that are he…
Affective Economies and the Politics of Saving Babies' Lives
Today, nearly every US baby is screened for more than fifty rare genetic disorders, regardless of insurance status or ability to pay. This article explores the dramatic expansion of state-mandated newborn screening by analyzing affective enactments within public discourses of newborn screening advocacy. Drawing on public records from newborn screening policy hearings and secondarily on our own ethnographic data, we examine how parent advocacy nar…
Newborn screening and maternal diagnosis
Ethnographic Approaches to Child Care Research
This article presents the findings from a review of ethnographic approaches to child care research. Ethnographic research has enhanced researcher and practitioner understandings of the child care environment by providing entry into the child care center as an important site not only of development and education, but also of social reproduction and enculturation. The extant research is summarized by identifying four dominant perspectives for viewi…
Narratives of prevention and redemption in opioid overdose obituaries
Obituaries of people who died from an opioid overdose represent a new territory for understanding cultural narratives of the US opioid epidemic. Drawing on textual analysis of 30 opioid overdose obituaries published on Legacy.com between 2015 and 2020, we describe a prototypical narrative conveyed through opioid overdose obituaries, which renders symbolic meaning through the voices of the bereaved. Obituary authors reimagine their subjects as tra…
Medical Aid in Dying
Medical aid in dying (MAID) has been a productive target for social scientific inquiry at the intersections of law and medicine over the past two decades. Insofar as MAID crystallizes and reflects personal and cultural understandings of key concepts such as individualism, dependency, dignity, and care, it is a rich site for social scientific theorizing. This article reviews and assesses the contributions of social scientific perspectives to resea…
Improving Expanded Newborn Screening
We thank the editors of JHSB for the opportunity to respond to the commentary by Watson, Howell, and Rinaldo. The commentators are the authors of the 2006 ACMG report that paved the way for expanded newborn screening. We appreciate their attention to our research. Most of their comments, however, reflect the imposition of biomedical cri teria upon a sociological project. We realize that the considerable criticism from geneticists, bio ethicists, …
The management of autonomy in adolescent diabetes
The transfer of responsibility for diabetes management from parent to child has been seen as a central challenge for the clinical care of adolescents with Type 1 diabetes. Research is needed to better understand how clinicians, patients, and families handle the delicate balance between parental involvement and adolescent responsibility for diabetes management. The aim of this study is to investigate the interactional processes by which an adolesc…
Community-based participatory research (CBPR) in South Africa
Ethnographic Approaches to Child Care Research
This article presents the findings from a review of ethnographic approaches to child care research. Ethnographic research has enhanced researcher and practitioner understandings of the child care environment by providing entry into the child care center as an important site not only of development and education, but also of social reproduction and enculturation. The extant research is summarized by identifying four dominant perspectives for viewi…
You're still sick!' Framing, footing, and participation in children's medical play
Building on foundational work in activity theory and cultural psychology, this article examines children's play to discern how biomedical practices and understandings of illness are negotiated, modeled, and reproduced among children dealing with a parent's cancer. Using discourse analytic methods, I analyze a videotaped playroom interaction involving three preschool-age girls, all of whom have a parent with cancer, and myself. The article employs…
The management of autonomy in adolescent diabetes
The transfer of responsibility for diabetes management from parent to child has been seen as a central challenge for the clinical care of adolescents with Type 1 diabetes. Research is needed to better understand how clinicians, patients, and families handle the delicate balance between parental involvement and adolescent responsibility for diabetes management. The aim of this study is to investigate the interactional processes by which an adolesc…
Giving an Account of One’s Pain in the Anthropological Interview
In this paper, I analyze the illness stories narrated by a mother and her 13-year-old son as part of an ethnographic study of child chronic pain sufferers and their families. In examining some of the moral, relational and communicative challenges of giving an account of one's pain, I focus on what is left out of some accounts of illness and suffering and explore some possible reasons for these elisions. Drawing on recent work by Judith Butler (Gi…
Patients-in-Waiting
What are the social consequences of the recent expansion of newborn screening in the United States? The adoption of new screening technologies has generated diagnostic uncertainty about the nature of screening targets, making it unclear not only whether a newborn will develop a disease but also what the condition actually is. Based on observations in a genetics clinic and in-depth interviews with parents and geneticists, we examine how parents an…
Sticky” Brains and Sticky Encounters in a U.S. Pediatric Pain Clinic
Newborn screening and maternal diagnosis
Improving Expanded Newborn Screening
We thank the editors of JHSB for the opportunity to respond to the commentary by Watson, Howell, and Rinaldo. The commentators are the authors of the 2006 ACMG report that paved the way for expanded newborn screening. We appreciate their attention to our research. Most of their comments, however, reflect the imposition of biomedical cri teria upon a sociological project. We realize that the considerable criticism from geneticists, bio ethicists, …
Personhood Diagnostics
This article examines an explanation circulating within a U.S. multidisciplinary pediatric pain clinic that links the neurobiology of functional pain disorders to desirable personal attributes such as smartness and creativity. Drawing on ethnographic observations and the analysis of video-recorded clinical interactions and focusing on two cases, I introduce the term personhood diagnostics to explore how the explanatory framework worked not only t…
Medical Technologies and the Dream of the Perfect Newborn
Feminist and disability scholars have critiqued the role of prenatal testing technologies in fostering parental expectations to give birth to "perfect" children. However, in the case of postnatal screening for genetic disorders, identifying large numbers of asymptomatic infants brings previously hidden imperfections into critical relief. Consequently, newborn screening technologies have altered the day-to-day landscape of early childrearing and d…
Expanded newborn screening
Population screening follows the logic of secondary prevention: a population is screened to detect disease early and to initiate treatment before symptoms emerge. However, not all population screening is justifiable under all circumstances. In this article, we unpack Wilson and Jungner's requirement that knowledge about the natural history of a disease must be 'adequate' for screening to proceed. We argue that any prior understanding of disease i…
Potentializing Newborn Screening
Virtually all 4.25 million babies born annually in the United States are screened for more than 50 rare genetic conditions. In a country plagued with widespread health-service access problems, this remarkable public health achievement depends on policy visions of newborn screening as the linchpin of secondary prevention and saving children's lives. Based on ethnographic research and drawing from a semiotic framework, we illustrate that newborn sc…
The Canon - 5
Diane Paul and Jeffrey Brosco, The PKU Paradox
Affective Economies and the Politics of Saving Babies' Lives
Today, nearly every US baby is screened for more than fifty rare genetic disorders, regardless of insurance status or ability to pay. This article explores the dramatic expansion of state-mandated newborn screening by analyzing affective enactments within public discourses of newborn screening advocacy. Drawing on public records from newborn screening policy hearings and secondarily on our own ethnographic data, we examine how parent advocacy nar…
TRAP laws and the invisible labor of US abortion providers
Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers (TRAP laws) are proliferating in the United States and have increased barriers to abortion access. In order to comply with these laws, abortion providers make significant changes to facilities and clinical practices. In this article, we draw attention to an often unacknowledged area of public health threat: how providers adapt to increasing regulation, and the resultant strains on the abortion provider w…
Neural imaginaries and clinical epistemology
Reframing Conscientious Care
“It's almost like putting salt in a wound, for this person who's already made a very difficult decision,” suggested Meghan Patterson (an alias), a licensed obstetrician‐gynecologist whom we interviewed in our qualitative study of the experiences of North Carolina abortion providers practicing under the state's Woman's Right to Know Act (House Bill 854; 2011). The act requires that women receive counseling with state‐mandated information at least …
Abortion providers, professional identity, and restrictive laws
Most studies on the impact of restrictive abortion laws have focused on patient-level outcomes. To better understand how such laws affect providers, we conducted a qualitative study of 27 abortion providers working under a restrictive law in North Carolina. Providers derived professional identity from their motivations, values, and experiences of pride related to abortion provision. The law affected their professional identities by perpetuating n…
Scripting Dissent
Abortion laws offer a point of entry for "the state" to intervene in intimate clinical matters. In this article, I explore the various uses of scripts and scripting in state-mandated abortion counseling following the implementation of North Carolina's (2011) Woman's "Right to Know" Act. The law mandates that women receive counseling with specific, state-prescribed information at least 24 hours prior to an abortion. Drawing on interviews with abor…
Down’s syndrome screening and reproductive politics
Sociological studies of screening may lead us to presume that screening is only consequential when a positive result is obtained. Yet Gareth Thomas’s Down’s Syndrome Screening and Reproductive Poli
Keeping out and getting in
Sociologists have tended to frame medical gatekeeping as an exclusionary social practice, delineating how practitioners and clerical staff police the moral boundaries of medicine by keeping out patients who are categorised as 'bad', 'deviant', or otherwise problematic. Yet medical gatekeeping, understood more broadly, can include not only keeping patients out of particular clinical settings, but also redirecting them to alternative sources of car…
On Talking Together about Ordinary Abortion
The scarlet “A” that the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's seventeenth‐century novel is forced to pin to her dress symbolizes the shame and social disgrace that she endures for conceiving a child out of adultery. In Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law, & Politics of Ordinary Abortion, Katie Watson argues that abortion is our era's scarlet letter: a mark of stigma that is invisible yet no less shameful, causing unnecessary cultural silences around what …
Choreographing Death
This article draws on ethnographic research on the implementation of Vermont's 2013 medical aid-in-dying (AID) law to explore a fundamental paradox: While public discourse characterizes AID as a mechanism for achieving an individually controlled autonomous death, the medico-legal framework that organizes it enlists social support and cultivates dependencies. Therefore, while patients pursuing AID may avoid certain types of dependency-such as thos…
Medicine (27 works) · Psychology (25 works) · Political science (23 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Law (19 works) · Abortion (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Reproductive Health and Contraception (9 works) · Health care (8 works)