The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.
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Try to comprehend what it is like to be that woman. Do you appreciate the words and caresses of your distraught family while racked with frustration at your inability to reassure them that they are getting through? Or do you drift in a haze, springing to life with a concrete thought when a voice prods you, only to slip back into blankness? If we could experience this existence, would we prefer it to death? And if these questions have answers, would they change our policies toward unresponsive patients--making the Terri Schiavo case look like child's play?
The report of this unusual case last September was just the latest shock from a bracing new field, the science of consciousness. Questions once confined to theological speculations and late-night dorm-room bull sessions are now at the forefront of cognitive neuroscience. With some problems, a modicum of consensus has taken shape. With others, the puzzlement is so deep that they may never be resolved. Some of our deepest convictions about what it means to be human have been shaken.
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If you believe every person should have control of his or her mind and body, it probably seems easy to leap to a quick, smug opinion about “our right to die in America.” Of course individuals have a right to die, the standard individualist position goes; the decision to end a terminal illness with the assistance of a physician should be left to the doctor and the patient.
Colby is a lawyer who has worked with right to die issues primarily as they relate to the persistent vegetative state, the condition wherein a person’s body is kept alive long after consciousness is gone. He has been on both sides of the issue, working with families that did and that did not want feeding tubes removed from their loved ones, always supporting their choices over the choices favored by the state. But as we witnessed last year in the case of Terri Schiavo, trying to decipher choice when the person at issue is brain-dead can lead to a complicated mess. If the individual whose life is at stake cannot make life-and-death decisions, who is best qualified to do so?
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