Almost a decade ago, in South Africa, a doctor discovered by accident that a common sleep aid, sold in the US as ‘Ambien’, is in many cases waking people up from “permanent vegetative states”.
http://www.helium.com/items/2272231-sleep-aids-may-revive-coma-patients
The theory of why this happens is based on why persistent comas happen. When part of the brain is damaged, the body released a chemical called GABA that “turns off” that part of the brain so it can be repaired. However, in some people, a big release of GABA *sensitizes* their entire brain to GABA, so that even the tiny, normal amount of GABA found in the blood normally, after production of GABA returns to normal, is enough to put the entire brain into a coma.
Ambien is a GABA blocker.
And remember that this has been known for a *decade* now, so if this “American bioethicist” is talking about killing people in persistent comas, she is either ignorant of this discovery, or, importantly, *indifferent* to it.
That is, in this latter case, that she *knows* that many of these people in “permanent vegetative states” could be *revived*, but she *wants* them to be killed, anyway.
I know this sounds truly horrifying, but such people are often so focused on how *they* define “quality of life”, that they are more than willing to sacrifice the lives of other people that they *feel* have an “unacceptable quality of life.”
If the patient recovers, then obviously he or she wasn't really in a permanent vegetative state. If the patient is killed by the medical profession, then obviously he or she will never recover so the diagnosis of permanent vegetative state was accurate.
It's really very simple.