In Wales, Leslie and Nick Hartland are fighting to keep their six-year-old daughter Amber on a ventilator, and therefore alive. Amber has Infantile Tay-Sachs, an incurable brain disease, and was hospitalized with a chest infection. A judge will soon rule on whether doctors can “withdraw the option of her being put in intensive care and given life-saving procedures in future.”

The Hartlands believe that money may be a factor in the doctors’ decision:

Mrs Hartland also told BBC Radio Wales that a member of staff at the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport had told them that Amber was costing other Gwent children money. The Gwent Healthcare NHS Trust has been asked for comment.

“We believe it is about money. Amber costs money at the end of the day,” said Mrs Hartland. “But my father, my husband’s mother and father, they have all paid their taxes and have never used the health service. Everyone is entitled to the health service.”

Mrs Hartland said Amber has a full life between bouts of illness - and enjoys foreign holidays and an active life. “Amber has a right to life,” she added.

A reader tipped us off to the BBC’s coverage of the story, which can be found here.

It is remarkable that it has gone unremarked—months into the election season, and nobody seems to have noticed that John McCain is running on an astonishingly Catholic platform. Nearly every time he ventures off the establishment conservative ranch, he moves in the direction of liberal Catholic politics.

So why doesn’t anyone want to talk about it? On the Left, this would mean acknowledging that a Republican might have more to offer than just such culture-war issues as abortion and stem cells—while also facing up to their own candidate’s manifestly atrocious record. On the Right, this would mean acknowledging that where McCain can seize the Catholic vote, he may do so by sacrificing conservative principle.

I write a bit about this in the new issue of the Weekly Standard.

Dan Moloney, former associate editor of First Things, has a nice article up on NRO today about teenage planned pregnancy and the Gloucester case. It echoes some points that should be familiar to readers of First Things (here and here).

What looks to be a smashing exhibit of J.M.W. Turner opens today at the Met:

The first retrospective of the work of J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) presented in the United States in more than forty years, this international exhibition highlights approximately 140 paintings and watercolors—more than half of them from Tate Britain’s Turner Bequest—along with works from other collections in Europe and North America. The artist’s extensive iconographic range is represented, from seascapes and topographical views to historical subjects and scenes from his imagination.

Also at the Met are pieces from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s medieval collection, includingh a notebook of Da Vinci’s, whose galleries in London are being renovated. If you’re in New York at all this summer, both would be worth checking out.

News from the UK:

Trapped inside their bodies, apparently switched off to the world, but still alive: they are the undead. Or so we thought. Forty per cent of patients in a ‘vegetative state’ are misdiagnosed. Now British scientists are leading the field in trying to put that right.

Continues:

Although Kate could not speak, or hear properly, or make any kind of signal, or take in sustenance except through a tube into the stomach, she was sometimes aware of herself and her surroundings. She had a raging thirst that was not alleviated by the ward staff. She was racked with pain. Sometimes she’d cry out, but the ward staff thought it was just a reflex action. Kate suffered so much pain and despair that she tried to take her own life by holding her breath.

Then a Cambridge neuroscientist called Dr Adrian Owen put her in a special kind of scanner and performed an unprecedented experiment. It revealed evidence of fluctuating levels of brain activation when she was presented with pictures of her parents. From that point, she started her long journey back into the world. This is a story about brain-impaired patients who come gradually out of coma into “minimal awareness” after being misdiagnosed as being in PVS: breathing, appearing to be wakeful, yet deemed to be dead to themselves and the world. It is also about the disastrous consequences of such misdiagnoses, estimated in the UK and other countries to be running at two in five cases. And, crucially, it is about a neuroscientific research programme that is set to transform the prospects of diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation of brain-injured people the world over.

And then there is this:

But here’s at least one mordantly amusing and true story told to me by a psychologist at Putney’s Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability. “Young man with motorbike head injury in a coma. His mum, a keen evangelical, comes every day with friends to sing Onward, Christian Soldiers by his bedside. She’s hoping to stimulate his brain into action. It works: he comes round, but he can’t speak. So they fit him up with one of those Stephen Hawking-type laptops, and the first words he speaks are: “For God’s sake, Mum, shut it!” That’s about as funny as it gets on a brain-injury ward, but there’s a serious take-home message. Even minimally aware patients can retain emotions, personality, a capacity to suffer – and, as the young biker showed, attitude.

As important as this news is, I actually don’t think it matters much to the ethical discussion surrounding the care of patients in so-called persistent vegetative states. I wrote about it after the last PVS breakthrough-study a while back for the Weekly Standard:

Always wary of the political and moral implications of their results, there were the predictable claims that the results shouldn’t been seen as having broad implications to other PVS patients. Of course the PVS patient par excellence, Terri Schiavo, was immediately brought up: James Bernat, a neurologist at Dartmouth Medical School, claimed, “I’m quite confident that [Schiavo] would not have responded in this way.” At the same time, however, he too was taken aback: “It’s a little disturbing. This suggests there may be things going on inside people’s minds that we can’t assess by interacting with them at the bedside.”

The reason, of course, that some find this study disturbing is because they believe it would entail a different moral status, and thus medical treatment, of the PVS patient. No longer dehumanized to mere biological life, the patient might retain activity in the mind, and thus rightly be classified as a person. Even some pro-lifers make the mistake of arguing along these lines, as if this recent study vindicates the anti-euthanasia position. “See, she has a mental life, we just can’t notice it through our normal five senses,” so the argument would go.

This, however, is a mistake. And those who uphold the inherent dignity and equal worth of all human beings regardless of age, handicap, disability, or incapacity should beware of championing this study and future studies like it. For the intrinsic value of human life is not contingent upon the results of brain scans indicating mental activity. To think that it is would require one either to affirm body-self dualism or to reject the proposition that the lives of all human beings are of equal, intrinsic worth. Both positions are untenable.

Read the rest to find out why.

So the hottest homiletical tool seems to be a piece of software called Wordle. Cut and paste the text of your sermon into the appropriate window and Wordle creates a verbal mosaic, calling out key words in various colors and designs. (You can also try that with your denomination’s confession of faith.)

Want to know whether your sermon is sufficiently Christ-centered? Wordle will give you a snapshot. Look at the words that pop. Fair chance those are the words that will be ringing in your congregants’ ears.

I, of course, put Wordle to an even higher purpose—I pasted in text culled from the screenplay for Twelve Monkeys, director Terry Gilliam’s underrated fear-the-future sci-fi magnum opus:

(I don’t need you to tell me I should get help, BTW . . .)