Sunny Von Bulow’s 28 year Coma
Sunny Von Bulow was discovered lying on her bathroom floor, with blood on her lip, barely breathing and unconscious. Her son and daughter believed that her second husband, Claus Von Bulow, had murdered her using insulin. He was found guilty, but then was acquitted due to information that was not presented in the first trial.
Sunny Von Bulow was kept in a coma for 28 years, until her death in 2008. For 28 years, she was fed through a tube in her stomach, and showed no signs of brain activity. However, her son and daughter, and her grandchildren (who she had never met) continued to visit her, leaving fresh flowers, gifts, and framed photos around her at all times. Her prolonged coma in a vegetative state introduces the question- Is it moral for people in comas be kept alive for extremely extended periods of time?
PVS, which stands permanent vegetative state, means that someone has a functioning brain stem and can breathe on their own, but other than that, they are not at all aware of or able to interact with their environment. The longer someone stays in this state, the less likely they are to recover and wake up. If they do wake up, it usually after a couple of hours or days- even after a month or two, those who wake up will most likely never walk, talk, or have much quality of life. Often family members keep their loved ones alive because they are hoping for a miracle, they can’t bring themselves to unhook life support, or they believe that the patient would have wanted to be kept alive.
There are multiple issues with keeping PVS patients alive indefinitely. Firstly, they take up beds in hospitals that could be given to people who need them, and who have a better chance of recovery and of living more years with a high quality of life. Additionally, some people argue that someone with PVS is not benefited from continued support- they have no potential to grow, develop, and live a normal life, as other groups who benefit from life support do. Doctors often have to determine between benefit and burden for their patients. For example, a person with painful cancer could prolong their life with more treatments, but this is often not done because the burden outweighs the benefit. We can also look at keeping PVS patients alive in a similar way- the burden is a financial on their families, emotional burdens, and also the burden of taking of hospital beds. Although it may seem inhumane to look at a person’s life in this way, PVS patients cannot feel pain, cannot think, and cannot really live.
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