Opinion: Some people in persistent vegetative states have working minds. Does keeping them in limbo amount to torture?

Imagine for a minute — or even for a few seconds — that your working mind is trapped in a body that can’t respond to a doctor’s voice or a spouse’s touch. You are, in essence, a prisoner within your own brain.

I think that could be torture. Others don’t.

What I’m referring to here is the plight of a subset of people diagnosed with a condition known as persistent vegetative state who are actually trapped in this way.

The persistent vegetative state was nearly 50 years ago by Bryan Jennett and Fred Plum as “the absence of any adaptive response to the external environment [and] the absence of any evidence of a functioning mind … in a patient who has long periods in the United States alone. It came to public attention most prominently during the controversy surrounding after she collapsed in February 1990. Most cases are thought to be irreversible.