Terri, Meet Haleigh

This was recently posted on Rock For Life:

"What's the deal with Haleigh Poutre? Haleigh is an 11 year old Massachusetts girl who was beaten severely (into a comatose state) by her stepfather and her aunt (who adopted her after her biological mother was deemed an unfit parent by the state). On January 17, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court granted permission to the Massachusetts Department of Social Services to remove Haleigh's feeding tube, effectively starving her to death in a matter of days. However, the day after the verdict was received, Haleigh began to show signs of improvement. She began to breathe on her own, the first time in four months that she did not need to use a ventilator. Other forms of improvement have since been observed, but the hospital officials have remained tight-lipped on most aspects of Haleigh's condition. Denise Monteiro, spokesperson for the Massachusetts Department of Social Services, stated that the decision to stop feeding her was the 'best diagnosis that we thought we had at the time.' The DSS has since rescinded that decision, and has not removed the feeding tube.

Haleigh's case is a perfect example of the faultiness of a 'persistent vegetative state' diagnosis. The British Medical Journal has reported that PVS is misdiagnosed almost 43% of the time! That alone should allow for serious questioning of any attempt to take the life of someone who has been diagnosed as PVS. Even with this, we now know that Haleigh has shown signs of recovery, and full or partial recovery may very well be possible; that is, if she's given the chance. The easy thing to do would be to let the government, courts, and hospital decide what her life is worth. The harder road would be to fight for this innocent little girl's right to life."

It is interesting to note that almost half of the people diagonsed as being in a vegetative state are in reality not. This could raise new questions about the unfortunate Terri Schiavo situation, and hopefully it will. Maybe if her husband would have actually allowed her treatment over all of the years she was in the hospice, Terri would have also showed such signs of life and would have been saved...as if active eye movements and grunts and moans debatedly resembling "I want to live" were not enough...

~Tribal~