Elyse Singer

• Reproduction
• Abortion
• End of Life Care
• Bioethics
• Reproductive Governance
• Mexico
• Health
• Citizenship
• Gender
• The Body

My research and teaching explore bioethical conflicts at the beginning and end of life to engage wider interdisciplinary conversations about dignity, inequality, and sociopolitical belonging. My work has coalesced around two major ethnographic projects grounded in Mexico on abortion and passive euthanasia. My scholarship places law, religion, and medicine in the same analytic frame to examine how people grapple with ethically extreme decisions about life and death in a context where state law has recently come to contradict other normative moral frameworks for moral reckoning, like religion. My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the American Association for University Women.

My first book, Lawful Sins: Abortion Rights and Reproductive Governance in Mexico, explores the aftermath of Mexico City’s historic 2007 abortion legalization. Drawing on over a year of ethnographic fieldwork, Lawful Sins offers an up-close look inside a network of public abortion clinics in the Mexican capital, analyzing the limits of state care and recognition afforded there. While many Mexican women today have options regarding their pregnancies not available just over a decade ago, they are also subject to the expanded reach of the Mexican state and the Catholic Church over their bodies and sexual lives. With timely insights on global struggles for reproductive justice in the post-Roe era, the book reorients prevailing perspectives that approach abortion rights as a hallmark of women’s citizenship in liberal societies. This research was recently featured in a national news article in USA Today.

With the support of a two-year Senior Research Award ($238,583) from the National Science Foundation and a Post-PhD grant ($20,000) from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, I recently launched a new study titled Remaking Mexican Death: Searching for Dignity at the Ends of Life. Situated across the palliative care wards of two major public hospitals in the Mexican capital, the study considers how terminally ill patients, their family members, and their palliative care providers strive to achieve a dignified death, and what bioethical and bureaucratic obstacles they encounter along the way. 

2022  Elyse Ona Singer. Society for Medical Anthropology Statement on Supreme Court Dobbs Vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization Decision, co-authored with Mara Buchbinder, Joanna Mishtal, and Claire Wendland. Medical Anthropology Quarterly DOI: 10.1111/maq.12741 

2022. Elyse Ona Singer. Lawful Sins: Abortion Rights and Reproductive Governance in Mexico. Stanford University Press.

·       Winner, 2022 Arthur J. Rubel Book Prize sponsored by the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.                            

·       Honorable mention for the 2023 Michelle Z. Rosaldo Book Prize sponsored by the Association of Feminist Anthropology.

·       Honorable mention for the 2022 Eileen Basker Memorial Book Award Prize sponsored by the Society for Medical Anthropology.  

·       Honorable Mention for the Council on Anthropology of Reproduction Book Prize sponsored by the Society for Medical Anthropology.

2019. Mounia El Kotni and Elyse Ona Singer. Human Rights and Reproductive Governance in Transnational Perspective. Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 38(2): 118-122.

2019. Elyse Ona Singer. Abortion Exile: Navigating Mexico's Fractured Abortion Landscape. Culture Health & Sexuality: An International Journal for Research, Intervention and Care. DOI: 10.1080/13691058.2019.1631963

2019. Elyse Ona Singer. Realizing Abortion Rights at the Margins of Legality in Mexico. Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 38(2):167-181..

2017. Elyse Ona Singer. Lawful Sinners: Reproductive Governance and Moral Agency Around Abortion in Mexico. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 42(1):11-31.

2016. Elyse Ona Singer. From Reproductive Rights to Responsibilization: Fashioning Liberal Subjects in Mexico City’s New Public Abortion Program. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 31(4): 445-463.

• Body, Power, Culture: Anthropological Approaches to the Body; ANTH 4953
• Regulating Reproduction: Morality, Politics, and (In)justice; ANTH 4953
• Bioethics, Biomedicine, Biotechnology; ANTH 4953
• Anthropological Perspectives on Health, Healing and Illness; ANTH 3243
• Global Cultural Diversity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology; ANTH 2203
• The Politics of Life and Death; ANTH 4953
• Ethnographic Methods; ANTH 5213