We predicted it and sure enough. The MSM is all a-panic about the revelations that the "PVS" woman in Great Britain was linking in minds of many with the plight of Terri. Today cookie cutter stories abound throughout the media in hopes of driving a wedge to separate any possible connection. Here is one of the many identical stories today by the one and same Ellen Goodman, (Goodman, now is that opposite badwoman?). Art Caplan did not find all this news to be cheerful either. Death is cheering to these types. Good news to people of good will is bad news to them.
What are we to make of this? An editorial in Science magazine, which published the research, was quick to warn that this case is nothing like that of Terri Schiavo. The British woman has something Terri did not have: a cortex. She suffered an injury, not a lack of oxygen. She was in her unresponsive condition for five months, not 15 years. She was not in a persistent vegetative state.
Nevertheless, those who play politics in their heads have found this research useful. Terri's father, Robert Schindler, declared game, set, match in the controversy: ``This new case is not surprising to our family."
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Always wary of the political and moral implications of their results, there were the predictable claims that the results shouldn't been seen as having broad implications to other PVS patients. Of course the PVS patient par excellence, Terri Schiavo, was immediately brought up: James Bernat, a neurologist at Dartmouth Medical School, claimed, "I'm quite confident that [Schiavo] would not have responded in this way." At the same time, however, he too was taken aback: "It's a little disturbing. This suggests there may be things going on inside people's minds that we can't assess by interacting with them at the bedside."
The reason, of course, that some find this study disturbing is because they believe it would entail a different moral status, and thus medical treatment, of the PVS patient. No longer dehumanized to mere biological life, the patient might retain activity in the mind, and thus rightly be classified as a person. Even some pro-lifers make the mistake of arguing along these lines, as if this recent study vindicates the anti-euthanasia position. "See, she has a mental life, we just can't notice it through our normal five senses," so the argument would go.
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