George Orwell once wrote, "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." The recent release of the Pinellas County autopsy of Terri Schiavo is a clear and convincing example of Orwell's assertion. The national thought and language has been overtaken by a Big Brother of sorts – the mainstream media, who is now "thinking our thoughts" and compelling us into their world of "doublethink."

Written using technical medical terminology, which is lost on most, the 39-page tome announced that the certified manner of death is "undetermined," and the cause of Terri's untimely departure from this earthly life was "Complications of Anoxic Encephalopathy," or, in layman's terms, a brain injury from lack of oxygen. The report continues to explain that because no one really knows what caused the episode 15 years ago that resulted in Terri's injury, her manner of death remains uncertain.

It is now official. Nobody really knows why Terri died.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember the ebb and flow Terri's riveting end-of-life struggle being reported internationally for weeks. There were highly published efforts by her family to prevent her court-orderd death by dehydration that involved the United States Congress, the president, the Florida Legislature, the Florida governor and an unprecedented number of courts. Even her final moments on this mortal coil were callously reported live as if it was the last two minutes of the Super Bowl. Billions of people all over the globe were morbidly transfixed on their television sets watching and waiting for Terri to slowly die after being deprived of nourishment and hydration.

Now the chief medical examiner of Pasco and Pinellas Counties, Dr. Jon R. Thogmartin, claims we really can't know how she died.

While Terri lay disabled and unable to speak, her caregivers were verbally spinning the account of her tortured, lingering death into a compassionate health-care fairytale. Terri's estranged husband, Michael, repeatedly told us that his wife "had died 15 years earlier." How many times did we hear the medical "experts" tell us that her cerebral cortex had "liquefied" or that Terri was in a PVS, a persistent vegetative state?

The autopsy was meant to confirm everything the death-peddling pundits have told us, and with such great authenticity and certainty that no one would dare question its findings. But it hasn't worked out that way.

The questions raised by the absurd declaration that the manner of death cannot be determined makes me wonder if Dr. Thogmartin is a student of the famous science fiction author George Orwell. In Orwell's masterpiece work "1984," he describes a society manipulated through the use of a deceptive propaganda tool known as New Speak. This tool, where the language was perverted to mean whatever the authorities wanted it to mean, produced "doublethink" in a malleable society. Doublethink is "the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."

It is evident that a form of New Speak has been employed the case of Terri Schiavo. We have been told that we must accept the "fact" that Terri actually died during her 1991 "accident" and that she was being "artificially kept alive" in spite of the fact that her body was "shutting down." But, in a momentary lapse in Schiavo New Speak, Dr. Thogmartin states that Terri was "a relatively health woman who could have easily survived another 10 or 15 years." Are both true?

It seems as though Dr. Thogmartion and his cohort medical examiners are creating a third class of human – the living dead. There are those of us who are alive, those who are dead, and now thanks to the Orwellian Thought Police, we have those, like Terri, who are somewhere in between life and death, hovering in a zombie-like existence.

We have been force-fed the concept that it was benevolent to deprive Terri of basic sustenance, yet our minds tell us it was sadistic. We are being trained to think, in classic Orwellian fashion, that bad is good in a diabolical attempt to justify the killing of the infirmed, disabled or otherwise imperfect people among us.

Today, because of the pro-death spin doctors corrupting our concepts of truth and morality, our society consented to the murder of Terri Schiavo. Tomorrow? Well, that is a future that even Orwell would not want to consider.

Troy Newman, president of OperationRescue.org, has been an active advocate for pro-life causes for 15 years. He is an author and ordained church elder.