JULY 16, 2003
ROBERT WOOD FOUNDATION HAS IT WRONG: DISABLED PEOPLE ARE NOT DEAD YET.
AUTONOMY today demands that the Robert Wood Foundation and its grantee Partnership for Caring stop labeling persons with chronic diseases and disabling conditions as terminally ill and in need of end of life care.
"The Robert Wood Foundation confuses disability with death," said Hugh Gallagher, President of AUTONOMY, Inc. AUTONOMY is an organization for people with disabilities who want choices in all aspects of life. "They are not the same. Disabled people and the chronically ill are not dying. They are not terminal.?
"Partnership for Caring, its program called Last Acts, and its website called Last Chapters — all have made this mistake. People with chronic or disabling disease are fully alive and their lives are no less valuable than those of the able-bodied. It is an outrage for Partnership for Care to include them as eligible for what the Foundation calls Last Acts.”
"In recent years the Johnson Foundation has allocated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to improve end of life care for persons in the last stage of terminal illness. This is a program strongly supported by AUTONOMY. Unfortunately over time, the program seems to have widened its focus to include persons with disability and chronic complaints. This is very dangerous and must be stopped. Now.”
"American society already devalues the quality of life of disabled people," Gallagher continues. "Severe cuts have been made in programs essential to disabled persons — Medicaid, housing allowances, welfare. Often one hears. ‘I would rather die than be confined to a wheelchair,' etc. To include the disabled in a program for terminal care furthers this unfair, unjust stereotype of persons with disability?"
"There is a slippery slope going on here: disability assistance is being cut back, disabled people cost too much, the disabled have lives not worth living, let us help them to their end of life. This is evil thinking and must not be allowed to go on."
AUTONOMY thanks Diane Coleman, President of Not Dead Yet, for her leadership on this matter.
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