Page 6 - Persistent Vegetative State News Today

Oxygen. >> jeff, legally, what are the big issues here? >> i think there is a factual issue in many more respects more important or determines the legal issue. thats what youre talking about with sanjay, whether she has any cognitive function at all. any judge will want that question answered first. it wont be enough simply to have her parents say we know we can communicate with her. they will need an independent evaluation whether she is like terri schiavo, completely in a persistent vegetative...

Evaluation whether she is like terri schiavo, completely in a persistent vegetative state or like some people with als, tony, judd, the writer, whos been writing recently about his experience with als, that she would certainly have more right to access if she had cognition. if she didnt -- >> if she had some level of cognition, she would have a greater legal right to access to her kids? >> she would have a greater legal right and they would have certain rights to have a relationship with their m...

And then from there, have the children go with their father if he wants to accompany them to south carolina, where they can see their mother for essentially the first time. >> joe johns, cnn, washington. lets dig deeper into legal and medical issues surrounding this case, cnn senior legal analyst and sanjay gupta. abbies parents are saying she responds by blinking in response to questions. does that give any indication of the state her brain is actually in? >> if in fact she was able to respon...

Their own talents in their own kind of ways. >> i can see why. that is beautiful. thanks so much, josh. all right. it is a landmark settlement for more than a billion dollars. so why is it leaving the nations african-american farmers feeling frustrated and disappointment? first, april begins this week. for christians this is holy week. jews begin celebrating passover this week. hear some of what happened this week in history. one year ago this week in 2009, general motors ceo rick wagoner re...

This woman. at age 26. she collapsed under medically murky circumstances and she fell into a coma and never came out of it. she is totally nonresponsive for years in a persistent vegetative state and she was in that state for a decade. for ten years before a court ruled that her husband, as her legal guardian could make the decision after a decade in the state that her feeding tube could be removed. he said she had been clear about her wishes before she became ill. she would have never wanted to...

Years in a persistent vegetative state and she was in that state for a decade. for ten years before a court ruled that her husband, as her legal guardian could make the decision after a decade in the state that her feeding tube could be removed. she had been cheer about her wishes before she fell ill. she would have never wanted to be kept alive artificially with a feeding tube especially for more than ten years. so the husband got the court ruling that her feeding tube could be removed. and aga...

For ten years before a court ruled that her husband, as her legal guardian could make the decision after a decade in the state that her feeding tube could be removed. she had been cheer about her wishes before she fell ill. she would have never wanted to be kept alive artificially with a feeding tube, especially for more than ten years. so the husband got the court ruling that her feeding tube could be removed. and again, ultimately within a couple of years more than three quarters of the countr...

They polled the country on whether or not that court was right when the court ruled the husband could remove her feeding tube after she had been a decade in this persistent vegetative state, only 7% of the country didnt have an opinion on that court ruling. everybody was following that and by a huge margin. by more than 20 points people believed what the court had decided there was right. that the husband as her guardian should be allowed to take that feeding tube out. the court made the right d...

Majority leader tom delay and leader of the senate republicans, he got them to call terri schiavo as a witness in congress. she sent her a subpoena ordering her to appear in washington d.c. this is a woman who at that point had been in a persistent vegetative state for nearly 15 years. but they subpoenaed her to be a witness in congress. the idea was apparently that they taught maybe if they called her witness then maybe they could envoke federal witness protection laws to yank her out of the ho...

Beginning of a very good stable, happy life. >> reporter: there were no signs during her pregnancy that things would go terribly wrong. abbies father. >> well, we didnt know anything about this until three hours after it happened. >> reporter: during delivery, abbie lost nearly two liters of blood, underwent an emergency hysterectomy, and her most vital organ, her brain, was starved for oxygen for almost 20 years. abbie survived, of course, though her brain was severely damaged. the triplets, re...