Sounds like Terri's Legacy left a mark.
With the rise of the Values Action Team, the Christian Right abandoned long-shot gambits such as eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and pushing for a Right to Life Amendment to the Constitution. It adopted a more incremental approach to pursuing its agenda, such as helping move legislation that gradually endowed personhood on unborn fetuses as a way to slowly chip away at abortion rights. "It's a much more typical approach of how America deals with social issues," said Senator Sam Brownback, chairman of the Senate VAT, launched a few years after its House counterpart. "It's rare that there's big, revolutionary type change. It's much more of an evolutionary type of process."
Of course, that was before few outside of Florida had heard the name Terri Schiavo.
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Ms. Lilly's story brings to mind one of the most remarkable and highly publicized cases of a person in a long-term vegetative state. Terri Schiavo was starved to death in March of 2005 after a Florida judge ordered her feeding tube to be removed. Schiavo had been in a "persistent vegetative state" for years following a stroke, and while her family insisted she responded to their presence, doctors determined that she would likely never recover.
Doctors insist that Ms. Lilly's case was not as severe as Ms. Schiavo's. However, they still cannot explain the bouts of consciousness that Christa Lilly has had over the years. In an interview for Channel 11 KKTV, Lilly's neurologist, Dr. Randall Bjork, commented on Ms. Lilly's bizarre awakenings by saying that he "would predict this would publicize the minimally conscious and perhaps more reporting of the cyclical awakenings."
Colorado Woman Briefly Wakes From a 6 Year Coma
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