"Conversations about hospice and end-of-life care often occur only with patients who independently..."

“Conversations about hospice and end-of-life care often occur only with patients who independently choose to have them. Only those who have the desire for control and choice and the resources to pursue them are guaranteed to be informed of their options, including hospice. In such an environment, minority and low income groups often aren’t getting quality care because the medical community has failed to win their trust, to inform them of their choices, to ask them how they want to die, even to tell them that they are dying.

In many of these cases, fear of the medical community is well founded. History has proven that predatory, racialized research and treatment practices can be deadly. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment studied infected black sharecroppers for decades but never treated them. Several U.S. states have a history of performing forced sterilizations on incarcerated and institutionalized black women. The suggestion that a dying patient consider hospice can also sometimes sound insensitive, as if some lives are not worth the effort or cost of aggressive treatment.”

- Ann Neumann: How the Other Half Dies - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics (via guernicamag)