Zogby's a ho for the Christian Right now?

Zogby is a polling company. They have many customers in the government, the private sector, etc. They'll do polls commissioned by liberals, conservatives, whoever. But who designs the questions themselves? I'd assumed that Zogby wrote them, but now I'm not sure what else to think after seeing this press release about a poll on the Terri Schiavo case.

A poll completed after the controversial death of Terri Schiavo finds that eight-in-ten (80%) likely voters say that a disabled person who is not terminally ill or in a coma, and not being kept alive by life support should not, in the absence of a written directive to the contrary, be denied food and water.  By a three-to-one (44% to 14%) margin, likely voters say that, when there is conflicting evidence on the wishes of a patient, elected officials should order that a feeding tube remain in place.  The survey, conducted by Zogby International on behalf of the Christian Defense Coalition, was conducted March 30 to April 2, 2005 and has a margin of error of +/-3.2 percentage points.

The same poll also finds a majority (56%) agree that Schiavo’s husband Michael should have turned guardianship for the severely-disabled woman over to her parents based on his decision to have a long-term serious relationship with another woman.  By a two-to-one (44% to 24%) margin, with one-in-three (32%) undecided, the survey finds that an incapacitated person should be presumed to want to live in the absence of written instructions such as a “living will".

So that's the summary. What did the questions say?

And here's where it gets really interesting...

If this was a court and not a poll, lawyers would be jumping up and screaming "Objection! Leading the witness!" and the (activist, no doubt) judge would bang his gavel and agree. 

The first two questions aren't even related, but they trigger a feeling of righteous outrage, don't they? Of course minorities' civil rights should be protected!  

The third question is whether Michael Schiavo should have turned custody of his wife over to her parents given the fact that he... no, not that he didn't take care of her, or abused her, but that he got together with someone else and had kids with them! That pushes another button right there for most of us.

The pump having been primed, so to speak, the poll next asks if there should be exceptions to the right of the spouse to make all those heavy decisions for their incapacitated spouse. "Well, if he's been violating her civil rights and cheating on her, hell yeah!" is a very understandable reaction at this point.

Make careful note of that word "incapacitated"... because it's the last time you're going to see it in this poll. Wave goodbye.

The new term of choice is "disabled."

Should the federal government intervene when "disabled people are denied food and water by"... here comes the bad guy "... a state court judge's order?"

Should the representative branch of "governments" (is this like "internets"? intervene when that horrible judicial branch "appears to deny basic rights to the disabled?" 

Now, I don't know about you, but when I hear or read "disabled," I picture someone in a wheelchair. Maybe even someone who is quadraplegic. Or someone who is developmentally disabled. I suspect this is true for most people. The term implies a human being with some of their abilities curtailed or missing, but still someone with their personhood intact.

So when we hear "disabled," most of us sure as hell don't picture someone whose cerebral cortex has been replaced by spinal fluid. Who doesn't have any brainwaves. Yes, technically that state is not "brain-dead" because there is still the brain stem, which controls breathing and reflex and response to some stimuli. But it basically is the living death of the self. There is no there there. But oops, that poll somehow forgot to mention that part.

So if that poll had included an accurate description of Terri Schiavo, and maybe some more background information on the Schiavo family then just those snippy little bits, I wonder if the answers would have been different? I'm guessing the answer is yes.

But that's what you get when you let your client write the questions. I'm pretty sure they did, anyway. Oh, and the client? The Christian Defense Coalition. 

Sadly, the damage is being done. Conservative write Debra Saunders is already all over the story, gleefully citing the poll in today's column. 

If anyone is still interested in this sad story or really understanding what a persistant vegetative state is and how it differs from a coma... and from normal consciousness, I'd like to point them towards this interesting article in the New York Times on April 5. It will probably go away soon (or at least not be free anymore) so here's the key bits:

As in sleep, people in comas may move or make sounds and typically have no memory of either. But they almost always emerge from this state in two to three weeks, doctors say, when the eyes open spontaneously. What follows is critical for the person's recovery.

Those who are lucky, or who have less severe injuries, gradually awaken. "The first thing I remember was telling my ex-boyfriend, who was at the foot of the bed, to shut up," said Trisha Meili, who fell into a coma after being beaten and raped in 1990, and wrote about the experience in the book, "I Am the Central Park Jogger."

In the days after this memory, Ms. Meili said, she slipped in and out of conscious awareness, "as if my body was taking care of the most important things first, and leaving my moment to moment awareness for last."

In fact, researchers say, this is precisely what happens. The primitive brain stem, which controls sleep-wake cycles as well as reflexes, asserts itself first, as the eyes open. Ideally, areas of the cerebral cortex, the seat of conscious thought, soon follow, like lights flicking on in the upper rooms of a darkened house.

But in some cases - Ms. Schiavo's was one of them - the cortical areas fail to engage, and the patient's prognosis becomes dire.

Neurologists were all but unanimous in diagnosing the condition of Ms. Schiavo, whose heart stopped temporarily in 1990, depriving her brain of oxygen. Brain cells and neural connections wither and die without oxygen, like marine life in a drained lake, leaving virtually nothing unharmed.

People with these kinds of injuries - Nancy Cruzan, whose case reached the Supreme Court in 1990 is an example - almost always remain unresponsive if they have not regained awareness in the first months after the injury.

In medical terms, they become persistently vegetative, a diagnosis first described in 1972 by Dr. Fred Plum of Cornell University and Dr. Bryan Jennett, a neurosurgeon at Glasgow University in Scotland. In a sense, the description of the diagnosis began the modern study of disorders of consciousness. "Before 1972 people talked about permanent comas, or irrecoverable comas, but we defined a different state altogether, with the eyes open, some reflex activity, but no sign of meaningful psychological responsiveness," Dr. Jennett, now a professor emeritus, said in an interview.

In an exhaustive review of the medical histories of more than 700 persistently vegetative patients, a team of doctors in 1994 reported that about 15 percent of those who suffered brain damage from oxygen deprivation, like Ms. Schiavo, recovered some awareness within three months. After that, however, very few recovered and none did so after two years.

About 52 percent of people with traumatic wounds to the head, often from car accidents, recovered some awareness in the first year after the injury, the study found; very few recovered after that. "It's the difference between taking a blow to the brain, which affects a local area - and taking this global, whole-brain hit," said Dr. Joseph Fins, chief of the medical ethics division of NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital.

Yes, some people do get better. But...

Dr. Joseph Giacino, a neuropsychologist at the JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison, N.J., has been following a group of brain-damaged patients with both oxygen-deprivation and traumatic injuries, and finds that the group with traumatic injuries - if they become minimally conscious - are far more likely to show signs of recovery than the others. "There is a real separation between these patients and the others in terms of improvement in the first year," Dr. Giacino said.

Ms. Schiavo showed no evidence of having ever entered a minimally conscious state, either in the early 90's or later, neurologists say. An EEG of her cerebral cortex showed almost no electrical activity, said a neurologist who examined her, and a dozen experts interviewed about her case agreed that an M.R.I. scan would have added no information.

So there you go. She was in a persistant vegetative state, with no minimal consciousness. That's not just disability, that's nothingness.

This poll is brain-dead.

Anyway, the complete press release from Zogby is below the cut...