Abstract

The pope supported his conclusion by arguing that some patients with PVS make at least a partial recovery, and, in the current state of medical science, we are still unable to predict with certainty which patients will recover and which will not. But here he seems to have been poorly advised. While it is true that in most PVS cases, we cannot definitively exclude the possibility of recovery, modern brain-imaging techniques do now enable us to know that in some PVS cases, the entire cortex has been destroyed. Then, no recovery is possible, for the cortex cannot reconstitute itself. Hence the argument for preserving the lives of these patients cannot be based on medical uncertainty