Vanguard’s and Fidelity’s charitable arms are bankrolling advocacy groups that make it easier for retirees to kill themselves.
Donor-advised funds (DAFs) facilitated by Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund (FC) and Vanguard Charitable contributed a combined millions of dollars total to Compassion & Choices, America’s largest and oldest assisted suicide advocacy group, according to ProPublica’s publicly available data.
Over 100 million Americans use 401(k)s for their retirement plans, which usually rely on asset managers, Micruity reported last December. Fidelity Investments and The Vanguard Group are among America’s largest asset managers, managing over $7 trillion and $12 trillion in 2024 respectively. They established their own charitable arms in the 1990s.
FC and Vanguard Charitable are independent cause-neutral 501(c)(3) public charities that house DAFs, which are giving accounts funded by individual donors who recommend grants to eligible nonprofits. They reportedly facilitated approximately a total of $1.4 million from 2020-2023 and $1.5 million from 2021-2024 in grants to Compassion & Choices through such accounts.
Vanguard and FC both declined to comment.
“Compassion & Choices monitors research around America’s aging population, conducts our own research, and listens closely to our hundreds of thousands of supporters, many of whom are part of the aging population or caring for aging loved ones and who represent a cross section of American political beliefs, faiths and demographics,” a Compassion & Choices spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation when asked how America’s aging population informs the advocacy group’s mission.
Compassion & Choices and the C&C Action Network combined reportedly spent over $1.5 million on “Direct Lobbying,” $3.7 million on “Policy and Litigation,” $3.9 million on “Advocacy,” and $8.3 million on “Public Education” in fiscal year 2024-2025.
Assisted suicide has been legal in Canada since 2016, accounting for over 5% of the nation’s deaths in 2024. A Canadian priest said he was offered assisted suicide twice over a broken hip, the DCNF reported in May.
Thirteen states and D.C. legalized assisted suicide, according to Compassion & Choices’ website. The group aims to expand assisted suicide access to at least half of the U.S. population by 2028.
Disabled rights advocates filed lawsuits against Illinois and New York last month over concerns that medical staff would use the states’ incoming assisted suicide laws to avoid providing disabled patients long-term medical care, the DCNF previously reported.
Compassion & Choices defended and California’s End of Life Option Act from multiple disabled rights groups in April 2023 and again in March 2025. The second lawsuit is pending, according to their website. They also defended current assisted suicide laws in Montana, D.C., and Vermont against multiple overturn attempts from the jurisdictions’ respective legislatures.
In addition to suggesting “Voluntary Stop of Eating and Drinking” under certain circumstances, Compassion & Choices’ LGBTQ+ Advance Care Planning Toolkit also suggested considering end-of-life “doulas” to help with “caregiver education, nonmedical physical care advice, life and legacy review, ritual creation, funeral guidance, estate planning, companionship, respite, and emotional support.”
“Our view around healthcare at the end of life is rooted in the freedoms Americans cherish: that terminally ill, mentally capable adults should not have the government impose one set of beliefs on how they must face the end of life,” the Compassion & Choices spokesperson told the DCNF. “These are private decisions that should be made by individual Americans in consultation with their doctors, families, faith leaders, and loved ones, not by politicians.”
FC in particular also helped facilitated over $82 million in grants to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, $834,000 to the pro-LGBTQ+ Human Rights Campaign, and $4 million to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in 2022, according to InfluenceWatch.
FC and Vanguard Charitable are “cause-neutral,” so facilitated grants don’t represent an endorsement by them or the financial service companies that helped establish them. This also means that such grants can go to both left-wing and right-wing nonprofits – so long as they’re considered eligible. FC was accused of denying grants to organizations that SPLC listed as hate groups in a July 2023 consumer complaint, the DCNF previously reported.
Both charities began denying grants to SPLC after the U.S. Department of Justice indicted the left-wing legal advocacy group for allegedly funding hate groups, multiple outlets reported last April.
(DCNF)