Consciousness in the brain stem

An article in the September 15 issue of Science News claims that kids without cerebral cortexes display enough basic evidence of consciousness to invalidate the automatic identification of the possibility of consciousness with a human cerebral cortex. The implications drawn in the story range from questioning when a person can be considered to be in a vegetative state, to whether newborns can feel pain, to whether the form of consciousness achieved by these kids extends to all vertebrates. As I understand the hypothesis being proposed, all of these entities have in common the inability to retain any meaningful memory of what happened to them more than an instant ago, except through behavioral types of conditioning (which is still enough for some of the kids in the story to learn to associate sounds like "mama" with particular people for whom they feel emotions). So are we forced by our inability to treat brown rats as conscious beings with rights (at any rate, I'm certainly unable to do so) to insist on a certain threshold of continuing memory for full consciousness, and to devalue the actual experience of consciousness, where actual suffering and experience of pain and pleasure as well as "being in the moment" occur? Would our ability to somehow use the memories of others to replace our own (by using Google, for instance, or because someone's willing to take care of us) make up for our own lacks in guaranteeing our rights as conscious beings? Where does this slippery slope end?