EUTHANASIA ADVOCATES ARE PRO-PVS

An article by Carl Rossini, posted at The American Thinker, considers the process of constructing a pro-death reality through the use of the term "PVS". Such terminology, that which dehumanizes a brain-damaged individual, offers support to the agenda of the Right to Kill movement.

Persistent vegetative state: diagnosis with an agenda

(Excerpts)

Of course, common logic will tell us that, no matter what condition a person is in, he or she will never become a vegetable. Is a dead person a vegetable? Taxonomy charts carried around by botanists don’t have spaces for dead people or dead animals, for that matter. Humans and animals do not morph into plants.

...One does not need a PhD in linguistics or a medical degree to conclude that, as a term, persistent vegetative state is not a useful description of a person who is awake but not conscious (otherwise known as a wakeful coma), who has lost the functioning of the portion of the brain which controls consciousness.

...So, if PVS is such a poor term to describe the medical condition of a wakeful coma, why is it a diagnostic term in the first place?

PVS is a very useful term if you are an advocate of euthanasia. If you believe that killing people who (in your opinion) don’t have much “quality of life,” whom you see as “trapped in their bodies” at the door to eternity, and who (in your judgment) are better off “released” from a life confined to bed, then the term persistent vegetative state works very well indeed.

Here’s how the process of euthanasia starts: you insert a feeding tube because it is just so much trouble to feed the patient. Then, you explain to the parents, husband, courts, press, an d everyone else that Joe or Jane is in a persistent vegetative state. Joe or Jane will never be self-aware. It is time to consider the option of removing the “artificial therapy” of the feeding tube.

The word “vegetative” has already dehumanized the patient, so the euthanasia enthusiast can usually kill them without too much opposition from the family, courts, or public. After all, the thing in the bed isn’t a person. Right?

...The crossroads are upon us, where men and women in medicine are going to be forced to choose between terminology that accurately communicates a patient’s condition, or language that facilitates the killing those patients with disorders of the brain. And the rest of us must learn to parse the science from propaganda in diagnostic language.