Thursday, July 3rd, 2008...6:21 am | Luke Gilman
Assessing Culpability for Parents Who Neglect Treating Sick Kids
ABC News and the ABA Journal reported today that a Massachusetts woman is being charged with child endangerment after she failed to pick up medications and take her 8 year old son to follow up treatments for his non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. At the time he was diagnosed with the disease, doctors indicated the boy would likely have a 90% chance of survival. However, due to lack of treatment, the boy’s cancer has returned, and doctors now say that his chance for survival has dropped down to 10%.
This case is pretty straightforward; however, it seems somewhat reminiscent of a less straightforward case reported by The Wall Street Journal three weeks ago about the debate over the right of parents to reject medical treatment for their children due to religious reasons.
The recent death from untreated diabetes of an 11-year-old Wisconsin girl has invigorated opposition to obscure laws in many states that let parents rely on prayer, rather than medicine, to heal sick children. Dale and Leilani Neumann of Weston, Wis., are facing charges of second-degree reckless homicide after their child, Madeline Kara Neumann, died on Easter after slipping into a coma. The death, likely preventable with insulin, has renewed calls for Wisconsin and dozens of other states to strike laws that protect parents who choose prayer alone in lieu of medical treatment.
Of course any decision would require states to walk a fine line between the freedom of parents to practice their religion and the responsibility of parents to take care of their children’s needs. Although they vary widely by state, 45 states currently have some sort of legal protection for parents who use spiritual healing. Some provisions uniformly protect parents from prosecution for solely pursuing spiritual healing for their children while others only protect parents from prosecution for said actions in misdemeanor cases. However, the article notes that states are slowly starting to rethink these statutes, opening parents who rely solely on spiritual healing to possible prosecution for child neglect and, in the Wisconsin case, reckless homicide. Some of these laws leave an important question hanging that states must resolve: “If a state permits people to employ prayers for healing, can it then hold a parent criminally liable if those prayers fail?”
Sources:
Wall Street Journal: A Child’s Death And a Crisis for Faith
ABC News: Mom Accused of Withholding Son’s Chemo
3 Comments
July 5th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
I’ve written extensively about these kinds of cases (including in my book When Prayer Fails [Oxford, 2007]), and they present a welter of complex and interrelated issues of law and ethics. Part of the problem in places like Wisconsin is that the child abuse laws that might govern these kinds of cases are still somewhat muddled and don’t really reflect the general public perception that, whatever their religious beliefs, parents should be held legally accountable for providing adequate medical treatment to their minor children.
And there is another case brewing in New York — this one involving the Amish. If anyone is interested, I will be following/analyzing this case (and the others) on my blog:
http://lawandfaith.blogspot.com/
July 7th, 2008 at 6:31 am
Thanks for the comment and great blog. Since most of these cases I’m familiar with generally involve sudden or catastrophic illness, the Hershberger case raises some very interesting issues. We’ll be following it closely.
July 7th, 2008 at 7:57 am
[...] our previous post, Assessing Culpability for Parents Who Neglect Treating Sick Kids, author and journalist Shawn F. Peters tipped us off on the New York case of Barbara and Gideon [...]
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