UPDATE: The Alzheimer’s Association has issued a statement about its partnership with Compassion and Choices and has disassociated itself from the group.
In an effort to provide information and resources about Alzheimer’s disease, the Alzheimer’s Association entered into an agreement to provide education and awareness information to Compassion & Choices, but failed to do appropriate due diligence. Their values are inconsistent with those of the Association. We deeply regret our mistake, have begun the termination of the relationship, and apologize to all of the families we support who were hurt or disappointed. Additionally, we are reviewing our process for all agreements including those that are focused on the sharing of educational information.
As a patient advocacy group and evidence-based organization, the Alzheimer’s Association stands behind people living with Alzheimer’s, their care partners and their health care providers as they navigate treatment and care choices throughout the continuum of the disease. Research supports a palliative care approach as the highest quality of end-of-life care for individuals with advanced dementia.
ORIGINAL STORY:
Remember the pro-euthanasia “Hemlock Society?” They have rebranded themselves as Compassion and Choices after a merger with another organization in 2005.
“Compassion and Choices” sounds better than Hemlock Society, since Hemlock was used to murder Socrates. How ironic is it that they chose the name of a poison that the Athenian state used to murder its greatest philosopher?
The primary goal of the group remains the same: promoting what is now called “Medical Assistance in Dying.” And one of their primary goals right now is apparently improving the image of suicide “in the Black, Latino, Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander (AANHPI) and LGBTQ communities.”
Nice. Apparently, minorities in America aren’t so excited about their doctors promoting death, and in states where Medical Assistance in Dying is legal very few minorities have taken that route.
I suppose that people who at times have been unwelcome in society doubt that the establishment has their best interests in mind. Shocking, I know.
Alzheimer’s Association and Compassion & Choices form partnership to improve end-of-life care for those living with dementia
Dec 21, 2022
National organizations will also cooperate on addressing inequities in care, support, and information for historically underserved communities
The Alzheimer’s Association, the nation’s leading voluntary health organization in Alzheimer’s care, support and research, and Compassion & Choices, the nation’s oldest, largest and most active nonprofit organization dedicated to end-of-life care options, today announced a new partnership to improve end-of-life care for those living with dementia.
The two organizations will collaborate with the goal of engaging communities across the U.S. to raise awareness of the prevalence of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, connect people living with dementia and their loved ones to resources and support, and sharing the steps everyone can take in the event of an early-stage dementia diagnosis to ensure the health care they receive is aligned with their personal health goals, values and priorities.
With 1 in 9 people over 65 living with Alzheimer’s dementia, and with 1 in 3 seniors dying with Alzheimer’s or another dementia, the partnership will also focus on reaching populations who haven’t traditionally had access to a supportive, culturally competent and engaged health care system, especially in the Black, Latino, Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander (AANHPI) and LGBTQ communities.
Lest you think that Compassion and Choices has changed its focus on medically ending life, let me disabuse you:
I personally am a skeptic of MAID, not because I don’t understand and sympathize with people facing horrible choices at the end of life. Old age can be cruel, and most of us don’t die suddenly while still healthy and vital at 99. Most people face decline, disability, and disease before death. I can understand people choosing a different path. As a Catholic, that path is foreclosed for me, but I get it.
But Canada. The problem is that the slippery slope is both real and inevitable. They are killing people because they are poor, depressed, blind…whatever. Because it saves money.
It is evil. And there is no stopping it. Canada is expanding their program to include “mature minors,” who will be able to choose death even without parental permission. It is ghoulish, not compassionate.
The Washington Free Beacon does a deep dive into the partnership between the Alzheimer’s Association and Compassion and Choices. It is shocking, and well worth reading the whole story.
From DEI to Please Die
There’s a reason for Compassion & Choices’s interest in “historically underserved communities”: Non-whites are just not that interested in assisted suicide. Of the more than 2,100 assisted deaths in Oregon, only 1 has been African American; in the state of Washington, 92 percent of assisted suicide deaths have been white.
So Compassion & Choices has invested tremendous effort to disseminate “end-of-life planning educational resources” to “underserved communities,” ramping up to 22,380 pamphlets and guides disseminated in 2020 from 0 in 2018.
Much of this material is written from the point of view of an assisted suicide lobby. An advanced directive is a document from a patient that provides instructions about how to make future medical decisions if the patient lacks the capacity to do so. Unlike other advanced directives in use, Compassion & Choices’s advanced directive for dementia patients has no discussion of what dementia is, the life expectancy—between 5 to 20 years—and the stages of dementia. Instead, dementia is described as “unnecessary suffering.”
The Alzheimer’s Association is key to this effort.Unlike Compassion & Choices, its brand is a trusted and known entity. With this partnership, Compassion & Choices can instead use the Alzheimer’s Association’s reputation and contacts with minority groups to disseminate resources that put a gloss on assisted suicide under the guise of “end-of-life care.”
“Care” has acquired a chilling new meaning in our increasingly Leftist world. Contrary to the image the Left likes to project, the definition of “caring for people” has transformed from improving people’s lives to “relieving suffering” through murder. Abortion and Medical Assistance in Dying are the most obvious manifestations of this, but other projects of the Left such as reducing energy and fertilizer use have a similar impact on human lives in the long run.
Kill off industrial society and capitalism, and the reduction in the human population is necessary. As they often say themselves, although they gloss it up in the guise of saving Mother Earth.
Outreach into minority communities is simply a reignition of Margaret Sanger’s project that required the elimination of non-whites. Population control too was aimed primarily at people of color. And now they are doing outreach to minorities to promote suicide.
And they call us racists.
The Alzheimer’s Association should get a lot of blowback about this, and I hope it does. Interestingly they have not advertised their partnership with the former Hemlock Society, allowing Compassion and Choices to do all the promotion. Undoubtedly they know that supporters might not be as excited as they apparently are about killing off dementia patients rather than finding treatments and cures.
If you don’t think this should be a priority for the organization, you can let them know.
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