Jivin J’s Life Links 2-4-10
by JivinJ
The new research suggests that standard tests may overlook patients who have some consciousness, and that someday some kind of communication may be possible.
In the strongest example, a 29-year-old patient was able to answer yes-or-no questions by visualizing specific scenes the doctors asked him to imagine. The two visualizations sparked different brain activity viewed through a scanning machine….
“We were stunned when this happened,” said one study author, Martin Monti of Medical Research Council Cognitive and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England. “I find it literally amazing. This was a patient who was believed to be vegetative for five years.”
As [Sarah] Cardinal’s Subaru wagon approached the Wolcott/Morristown line, it collided head-on with a Subaru sedan driven by 19-year-old Ian Masse of Craftsbury.
Later that day, as Cardinal struggled at the hospital with numerous injuries from the crash, she learned that her twin fetuses — she was 8 months pregnant — didn’t survive.
This recent accident is similar to another car accident which occurred in August:
If her story sounds familiar, it is eerily similar to that of Patricia Blair, a Bennington woman who lost her 6-month twin fetuses (Kaleb and Harley, pictured left with their mother) in a car crash in August. Blair was outraged to learn that charges against the other driver in her crash would not relate to the deaths of her fetuses. She is fighting for changes in state law that would allow that.
Meanwhile in this country, a recent Angus Reid poll finds that only 1 in 5 Canadians is aware that our abortion law (or lack thereof) permits a woman to have unrestricted access to abortion at any time during her pregnancy. Contrary to the received wisdom about Canadians’ social attitudes, the poll found that “respondents are almost evenly divided on whether the health care system should fund abortions whenever they are requested.”
Abortion is often described as a “divisive” issue — usually by those who want the other side to give up. Yet there is common ground. One finding of the Angus Reid poll, for instance, tells us that: “A large majority of Canadians (79%) would back an initiative in their own province that would make it mandatory for health care workers to offer information to pregnant women about alternatives to abortion.” This suggests most people agree that even if abortion will never again be illegal, it remains broadly undesirable — a last option when others have been exhausted….
So, what if we agreed that, as long as public money subsidizes abortion, an equal or greater amount should go toward a mechanism to find homes for unwanted babies?

It MUST be illegal again, because it is already illegal under natural law, moral law. It is a violation of basic human rights and we have to try to stop it.
It sickens me that born humans will so easily tolerate violence toward unborn humans.
Try asking if people want violence against themselves to be “legal”. They wouldn’t be quite as supportive of that, now would they?
Does anybody here have twins? If so, what do they look like when they come out of the uterus? Does the umbilical court branch off or something?
I always wanted identical twins, but unfortunately you just can’t order them menu items (sigh)!
My childhood best friend has twins (almost a year old), a boy and a girl. I got to meet them back in October, right before my friend was moving to Hawaii because her husband is stationed there. I am pretty sure that each baby has his or her own separate umbilical cord when it comes to twins.
Look at that sweet Mommy holding her precious little ones.
For more on the twins in the photo, see http://www.benningtonbabies.com
View a beautiful photo montage of the babies and their mother (In the center of the “What’s to be done?” box)
It is incredible that this scenario (especially both involving twins!) has repeated itself within 6 months in this small state. My heart goes out to both mothers, fathers, and families. I believe the second accident wasn’t even reported in the paper or on the news, since there were “no fatalities.” Imagine how the parents feel not having their babies recognized as being victims of a fatal car accident.
I cannot imagine the overwhelming GRIEF of losing your babies that you planned for, longed for…going home to an empty nursery..UGH. It makes me cry just to imagine it! And then on top of it all to be told that your babies weren’t victims, and you didn’t really lose anything of value and the other driver who is at fault won’t be charged with anything, when he/she KILLED your children! This is SO UNJUST!
where is Gloria Allred? She should be all over this!
That second story is just heartbreaking. The picture almost made me cry.
What a horrible thing for those mothers to experience! Let’s hope they make those changes in the law.
Phillymiss: Twins always have separate umbilical cords. (At least, in non-pathological cases; I imagine conjoined twins often do not. There is also something called twin-to-twin transfusion in identical twins sometimes, where they share blood somehow–don’t know much about it except that it is dangerous to the babies).
Identical twins may or may not share an amniotic sac and a placenta. Fraternal twins always have a separate amniotic sac and placenta.