Free Republic

LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture. His most recent book is the Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World. This opinion column originally appeared in the Church Report.Terri Schiavo continues to prick our collective conscience, our sensitivity to the way she died -- deprived of all food and water, even the balm of ice chips for nearly two weeks -- as raw today as on the day she drew her last breath five years ago next March. Usually, the trauma remains...

The case of Terri Schiavo--who died five years ago next March, deprived for nearly two weeks of food and water, even the balm of ice chips--continues to prick consciences. That may be one reason the case of Rom Houben, a Belgian man who was misdiagnosed for 23 years as being in a persistent vegetative state, is now receiving international attention. In 1983, Houben suffered catastrophic head injuries in an automobile accident. He arrived at the hospital unconscious. Doctors eventually concluded that his case was hopeless, and his family was told he would never waken. But the Houben family, like...

LifeNews.com Note: Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. He is the editor of Artificial Nutrition and Hydration: The New Catholic Debate (Springer 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse, where this article originally appeared. Having spent 20 years wrongly diagnosed as in a persistent vegetative state, Rom Houben reminds us that disabled persons are capable of many more substantive opportunities for human fulfillment than we are initially inclined to believe. But is bodily life just as such worth preserving? Can care-givers...

It is remarkable how frequently we underestimate the most powerful force in the known universe: a mother’s love. The story of Rom Houben is further proof, if proof were needed. Houben spent 23 years in what doctors regarded as an irreversibly vegetative state after a car crash at the age of 20. His mother, Fina Nicolaes, a nurse, was at all times convinced that her only son was sentient — alive, in the fullest sense of the word. Yet all the experts involved in Houben’s care declared her son was simply a breathing cadaver. Nicolaes even took Houben to the...

A lot of people seem emotionally invested in Rom Houben not actually being conscious. But all the evidence is on the other side.  Now, his doctor Steven Laureys is interviewed in the New Scientist about his diagnosis.  From the interview: Can you say what makes you so sure he is conscious?When I first saw Rom three years ago, he had been diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. We used the Coma Recovery Scale – Revised (PDF), which is a bedside behavioural assessment done in a very standardised way, and which you do repeatedly so as not to miss...

The family of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who was artificially kept alive for 15 years, say they feel both heartbreak and vindication over the news this week that a Belgian man thought to be in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) was fully conscious for two decades. Schiavo, who had been diagnosed with a profound brain injury, was at the center of a seven-year legal tug-of-war that involved Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court and even President George W. Bush before a judge granted her husband the right to allow her to die in 2005. In a strikingly similar case...

If Rom Houben's case proves anything, it is the arrogance of those who think they can pronounce upon the state of a patient's consciousness, and determine his subsequent fate--when humility should force them to admit they cannot possibly know what that patient may be experiencing. Houben is the Belgian man who spent 23 years misdiagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state when he was actually conscious and suffering from locked-in syndrome as the result of an auto accident. Locked-in syndrome means the individual is paralyzed, but retains full consciousness. The misdiagnosis was discovered thanks to state-of-the-art brain scanning technology...