In this powerful and probing look at the reality of everyday choices in neonatal intensive care units, Renée Anspach explores the life-and-death dilemmas that have fueled national debate. Using case studies taken during sixteen months of extensive interviewing and observation, Anspach examines the roles of parents, doctors, nurses, and bioethicists in deciding whether critically ill newborns—be they premature, terminally ill, or severely malformed—should be saved by medical technology, or at least kept alive a little longer.
Deciding Who Lives Fateful Choices in the Intensive-Care Nursery
About the Book
Table of Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Introduction:
The Dilemmas and Their Dimensions
Chapter 2. Theorizing About Life-and-Death Decisions:
A Critical Review
Chapter 3. Predicting the Future:
Why Physicians and Nurses Disagree
Chapter 4. Producing Assent:
Parents, Professionals,
and Life-and-Death Decisions
Chapter 5. Diffusing Dissent:
Parents, Professionals,
and Conflict in Decisions
Chapter 6. Beyond the Nursery:
Life-and-Death Decisions
and Paradoxes in Public Policy
Appendix 1. Field Research and the Sociology of
(Sociological) Knowledge
Appendix 2. Interviewing
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Awards
- 1996 Robert K. Merton Award, Science, Knowledge, and Technology section of the American Sociological Associat