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

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.