Should Parents Who Call God Instead of the Doctor Be Punished?

[moobu2]

In Wisconsin, this week's trial over Kara Neumann's death marks a new battle over children's health care rights.

—By Deena Guzder




Last Easter Sunday, 11-year-old Kara Neumann of Weston, Wisconsin, lay motionless on her bed, too weak to walk or speak. If her parents had called the hospital that day, Kara might have lived. Instead, Dale and Leilani—followers of the Unleavened Bread Ministry, an online church that shuns medical intervention—knelt in prayer beside her. Kara died a few hours later of diabetic ketoacidosis, a result of undiagnosed and untreated juvenile diabetes.

Are Dale and Leilani guilty of reckless endangerment? That's a question juries will start to answer this week as Leilani stands trial May 14. (Dale will be tried separately in June.) If convicted, each parent faces up to 25 years in prison. "The free exercise clause of the First Amendment protects religious belief, but not necessarily conduct," Judge Vincent Howard of Marathon County Circuit Court wrote when he ruled that the Neumanns must stand trial on charges brought by state attorney Jill Falstad. Howard has ordered all parties in the case not to speak to the media.

The highly anticipated trial has opened a new front in the long-running war between some religious communities and the medical establishment over children's health care. "We are not commanded in scripture to send people to the doctor," Unleavened Bread Ministries preacher David Eells said in a statement to his followers, "but to meet their needs through prayer and faith." Under current Wisconsin law, his followers aren't commanded by the state, either. Part of the legacy of the 1996 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which included a landmark exemption for parents who do not seek medical care for their children for religious purposes, is that parents cannot be accused of child abuse or negligent homicide if they genuinely believed that calling God, instead of a doctor, was the best option available.

While all states give social service authorities the right to intervene in cases of child neglect, criminal codes in more than half also provide additional protection for religious parents who forgo mainstream medical treatment. Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) and the Church of Christ, Scientist in Wisconsin are currently working on legislation that may further impact children's health care by creating an "affirmative defense" for religious parents who choose "faith healing" over mainstream medicine.




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[Cronus Protagonist]

1. Of course not!

They need to have their children removed into safe care, and they are free to do whatever their god wants them to do, as long as it doesn't involve the innocent children.

[PDJane]

2. When I said that stupidity should be fatal,

This wasn't what I had in mind...and note that it was a bad joke.

I leave the punishment to cooler heads than mine....and hope that they have a stronger stomach than mine too. This is heartbreaking, and a good reason to educate the populace out of the reliance on religion.

[Howardx]

3. yes n/t

[ThirdWorldJohn]

5. Isn't God satisfied with all the children he killed in Iraq?

[Howardx]

8. no n/t

[Towlie]

4. Isn't it ironic that typical conservatives will defend these parents yet support outlawing abortion?

[hlthe2b]

6. Well, we could give them a whopping big dose of insulin...

Send them into insulin crisis(and let them decide if they want to pray or have the waiting EMTs deliver life-saving glucose)
I'm kidding...(I think)


Parents that are this ignorant, this willfully ignorant in the name of religion...I just don't know what to say, but yes,they need to be held to account. What the penalty should be, I couldn't say, but surely there has to be some sense of justice for this poor child.

[EvolveOrConvolve]

7. Yep - they should be prosecuted for voluntary manslaughter

And I don't think we should stop there - I think that the church organization itself shares a large part of the liability. The leaders that are pressing this bullshit on their members should be in prison - they're not religious leaders, they're criminals. A church organization should be held to the same standards as regular citizens or corporations when it comes to liability.

And WTF is an "online church"? Is this a way for the Unleavened Bread Ministry to maintain less overhead while fleecing their members?

[struggle4progress]

9. I think the state ought to have some ability to intervene in such cases -- but there

are several legitimate issues that need to be recognized: the medical profession is often, but not always correct; and most parents sincerely love their children and do not actively wish them harm

In cases where a clear diagnosis of a known serious condition can be reached, and there is a standard treatment with good prognosis, state intervention does not seem problematic. On the other hand, state intervention for minor ailments would clearly be heavy-handed. And it is not at all clear to me why the state should intervene in certain cases of life-threatening conditions where the treatment was onerous and the chance of a favorable outcome slim: who wants to insist a parent must subject a child (say) to extensive painful or confining treatment, if the expected treatment has a high probability of failure and the untreated child might reasonably expect a short life but one which the child might sometimes enjoy?

In applying criminal law to such cases, one might want to ask exactly what the intent of the criminal punishment would be? Depending on the crime, various answers are possible, and our society does not currently sort the possibilities carefully. Retributive state justice perhaps exists to prevent blood feuds, by incorporating the violence in the state rather than in the families of victims. Protective justice attempts to insulate society-at-large from dangerous people. Dissuasive justice aims at discouraging rational actors from commission of crimes, by threatening unpleasant consequences. Reformative justice hopes to change the character of the one-time criminal for the better. In cases like this, involving children, the criminal law should be tailored to whatever form seems most likely to have the real effect of protecting children: the retributive, dissuasive, and reformative elements might be secondary