I offer the following for any reader unfamiliar with the issues (like Bill O'Reilly!):
A defintion of the persistent vegetative state
The term "persistent vegetative state" was introduced by Jennett and Plum in a 1972 article in the journal Lancet to describe the condition of patients with severe brain damage in whom coma has progressed to a state of "wakefulness without awareness" (795).
According to Dr. Lance Stell of the Department of Internal Medicine and a member of the Ethics Committee at Carolinas Medical Center, Jennett and Plum were particularly interested in a syndrome that seemed to have been made possible by medicine's capacities to keep patients' bodies alive (personal interview). Patients in this vegetative state have no cerebral cortical function, meaning that they are unconscious and unaware, but exhibit sleep-wake cycles with either full or partial hypothalamic and brain stem autonomic functions.
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Coma and Persistent Vegetative State
http://healthlink.mcw.edu/article/921394859.html
A coma is a profound or deep state of unconsciousness. The affected individual is alive but is not able to react or respond to life around him/her. Coma may occur as an expected progression or complication of an underlying illness, or as a result of an event such as head trauma.
A persistent vegetative state, which sometimes follows a coma, refers to a condition in which individuals have lost cognitive neurological function and awareness of the environment but retain noncognitive function and a perserved sleep-wake cycle.
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Medical Aspects of the Persistent Vegetative State— First of Two Parts
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/330/21/1499
The Multi-Society Task Force on PVS
ABSTRACT
This consensus statement of the Multi-Society Task Force summarizes current knowledge of the medical aspects of the persistent vegetative state in adults and children.
The vegetative state is a clinical condition of complete unawareness of the self and the environment, accompanied by sleep-wake cycles, with either complete or partial preservation of hypothalamic and brain-stem autonomic functions. In addition, patients in a vegetative state show no evidence of sustained, reproducible, purposeful, or voluntary behavioral responses to visual, auditory, tactile, or noxious stimuli; show no evidence of language comprehension or expression; have bowel and bladder incontinence; and have variably preserved cranial-nerve and spinal reflexes. We define persistent vegetative state as a vegetative state present one month after acute traumatic or nontraumatic brain injury or lasting for at least one month in patients with degenerative or metabolic disorders or developmental malformations.
This is a case of a Flordia Judge executing a disabled woman because, in my opinion, her adulterous (and perhaps greedy and abusive) husband wants her dead (ugh, Florida judges playing liberal societal engineering again, right under Jeb Bush's nose no less!).
I wonder, could it be that Flordia is executing Terri in order to set a precident whereby elderly and infirm citizens can routinely be euthanized, rather than the state paying to support their state-deemed useless lives?
Has 'quality of life', 'level of intellectual participation' become the standard by which the right to LIFE will now be adjudicated? This is already the standard by which democrats defend the slaughter of alive prenatal infants, so hold on to your loved ones because the Pubbies in Florida are now allowing (and perhaps facilitating) this to be extended to the elderly and disabled.