Coma stories prompt reflection

Far from resolving the argument between pro-life and pro-choice activists, the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v Wade only hardened the antagonists' positions.

While the pro-choice lobby has focused on facilitating abortion, its members also lean toward legalizing physician-assisted euthanasia. Its principle is the same: People own their own lives and deserve to make up their own minds about matters of life and death.

The same principle has been extended to cases of comatose patients with no hope of recovery, who are kept alive with the aid of respirators and feeding tubes. They are assumed to be no longer human but only surviving in a vegetative state.

As a consequence, some families argue that they have the right to petition doctors to "pull the plug," knowing that it will result in the loved one's death.

Terri Schiavo was a comatose woman whose husband wanted her feeding tube withdrawn, against the wishes of her parents. After seven years of legal battles, the husband's will prevailed. Thirteen days after her feeding tube was withdrawn, Schiavo, 41, died on March 31, 2005.

Since then, cases have come to light of unresponsive patients presumed to be in a vegetative state who are actually conscious — and therefore "human." To pull the plug on such a person is to condemn him or her to being buried alive.

When Dr. Steven Laureys of the coma science group at Liège University in Belgium performed a tomography brain scan on Rom Houben, he discovered that the man's cerebrum was functioning normally. Doctors had written Houben off as a vegetable after a car crash 23 years earlier.

Some marginal movement allowed the patient to use his right index finger to press a button for "yes" and "no," restoring his communication with the outside world. Nevertheless, he had been conscious all those years. How had he survived? "I meditated. I dreamed I was somewhere else," he replied by computer.

Houben's case is not as rare as one might imagine.

Helen Gill-Thwaites of London's Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability said of such patients: "Astonishingly, we discovered that 43 percent of patients assessed had also been wrongly diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state, with serious implications, including the removal of life support."

Can someone with such a disability find contentment? When psychological tests measuring self-assessed happiness are carried out on such patients, the results are not at all what conventional wisdom would suggest. One consultant told Dominic Lawson of The Sunday Times: "Where zero is the middle of the happiness-unhappiness scale, minus five the most depressed and plus five the most euphoric, most of my patients indicate — when they are able to — that they are between plus three and plus four."

It is a telling argument against rushing to pull the plug on a person's life.

David Yount's latest book is "Making a Success of Marriage: Planning for Happily Ever After" (Rowman & Littlefield).