Terri Schiavo News

A patient presumed to be in a vegetative state for five years has been able to communicate with doctors using just his thoughts, according to a study.

A living will may be defined as a form of advance medical statement or directive, which specifies what types of medical treatment are desired in the event that a person becomes terminally ill or incapacitated.

For the brother of Terri Schiavo , Wednesday's news that a team of researchers in England were able to use a novel scanning technology to establish limited communication with a man in a persistent vegetative state was bittersweet.

St. Petersburg, Fla., Feb 4, 2010 .- Reacting to news of a breakthrough in brain scanning technology, Terri Schiavo's brother Bobby Schindler is calling for a halt to removing hydration from brain-damaged patients who are thought to be in a persistent vegetative state.

Many of the patients were labeled with the same diagnosis: "vegetative state." Their head injuries, teams of specialists had concluded, condemned them to a grim condition: alive yet devoid of awareness of the world around them.

In a study certain to rekindle debate over life-sustaining care for those with grievous brain injuries, researchers report that five patients thought to be in a persistent vegetative state showed brain activity indicating awareness, intent and, in one case at least, a wish to communicate.

Scientists have detected glimmers of awareness in some vegetative brain-injury patients and have even communicated with one of them -- findings that push the boundaries of how to assess and care for such people.

Recently, a story was related to me by a resident of the State of Louisiana that demonstrated just what is occuring after the death of Teri Schiavo - who died, of course, under a judicial fiat in Florida a few years ago deeming that feeding and hydration intubation also was a artificial life support, rather than the definition that had held and was ...

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.

Apparently, judicial activism like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. On Sunday, Texas Senator John Cornyn told Fox News that the impact of the Supreme Court's Citizen United ruling, which erased decades of precedents on corporate political campaign financing, has "been overstated." Given the victory in Massachusetts this week that his National ...

Friends, many of you were with us during the battle for Terri Schindler Schiavo's life five years ago.

As throngs of protesters gathered outside the Florida hospice where the brain-damaged Terri Schiavo has been without food or water for 10 days, her distraught parents apparently accepted for the first time that they had run out of legal options to save her life.

The weather was kind Saturday, misting rather than pouring on the 1,000 or so participating in the annual March for Life St.

Most scholars concerned with the material basis of consciousness are cortical chauvinists.

Sarah Palin, the numerous Tea party patriots, and last summer's warnings of potential unrepentant death panels taking hold of life-and-death medical decisions stirred up a nation and brought focus to one of the most important issues of our past decade.

I recently published a paper in Neuroethics called, "It Takes Two: Ethical Dualism in the Vegetative State." In this paper I explore the possibility of ethical dualism, a type of ethical pluralism that I think might help us to answer the problems raised by cases like that of vegetative patients, such as Terri Schiavo and Lauren Richardson.

A decade ago, we were all on edge, stockpiling bottled water, withdrawing a little extra cash and wondering if the Y2K bug was going to disrupt life as we knew it.

LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture.

Sara Harvey sees a similarity between her situation and the Schiavo family's. Sara Harvey says her husband, Gary's, life is on the line.

The notion is growing that the institutional or individual conscience of a health professional trumps a patient's wishes when they conflict.