CALL IT "Terri's Revenge." Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state, was the subject of a huge legal battle and intense media attention when her husband, Michael Schiavo, wanted to disconnect her feeding tube, effectively ending her life.
Now comes a study published in the journal Science that sheds new light on PVS. A 23-year-old English woman, who sustained severe head injuries in an auto accident in July 2005, became a subject of study at the British Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. Although she was comatose and considered "vegetative," new tests found the young woman had considerable brain activity.
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Since the Reagan Administration first embraced and got in bed with the religious right, a cornerstone of Right Wing ideology has been the so-called "pro-life" stance. In my thinking, they are anything but. What? You ask? The righties are not "pro-life?" In a word, no. Of course they are against abortion and many types of birth control. So that makes them "pro-birth." Once the child is born, their interest drops off dramatically.
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Sensible opinion. But it's not only this case. We have far too many stories and studies like this to have any confidence in medical opinions about so-called PVS. The truth is, brain science is still primitive, and no matter what advances are made, we never will find "will" or "mind" inside by peering at "brain" from the outside.
More revenge for Terri will come when we clear away the lies and listen to all the media- and court-suppressed evidence that she was not in a PVS.