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Father found guilty in 'prayer death' case
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Like Daniel Hauser, eleven-year-old Madeline Neumann became gravely ill, and like Daniel, her parents refused to seek appropriate medical care. Unlike Daniel, though, Madeline didn't come to the attention of government officials until it was too late. Instead, for the last month or so of her life she became weaker and weaker, suffering from extreme thirst and nausea, until finally she lapsed into a coma and died on the floor of her home while her parents stood around and did nothing.
Well, not nothing, I guess -- they prayed. They prayed, and they had their friends pray, and waited for divine intervention. They could have taken their daughter to a doctor, where she would have been diagnosed with diabetes and lived a long and relatively healthy life, but they didn't. "If I go to the doctor, I am putting the doctor before God," her father would later say in his own defense. "I am not believing what he said he would do." *
I am, as ever, interested in the line between the right of parents to practice their religion, and the right of minor children to enjoy the protection of the courts when their parents fall down on the job. This case didn't turn out well for anybody in that family: Madeline is dead, and her parents have both been convicted of second-degree reckless homicide (her mother earlier in the year, and her father last week) and face a sentence of up to twenty-five years to life. Their other children have lost a sister and both parents in the space of a little more than a year. So nobody wins here, but I wonder if this is the beginning of the government's willingness to prosecute parents who cause harm (or allow harm) to their children come to their children in the name of religion. It's always been a touchy area, and for the most part "It's my religion" is a fairly good excuse. In almost every state, for instance, parents can decline to vaccinate their children for religious reasons, but in only a few can they decline on the grounds of having looked at the science. That kind of reasoning doesn't have any place in a modern society.
I don't want to come across as anti-religion here, because I'm not. The majority of Americans are believers (largely Christians) who teach their religious values to their children and still manage to take them to doctors when they break bones or develop cancer. I also believe that adults in this country are free to make any kind of misguided and irrational decisions they want. Handle snakes? Fine. Fast? Be my guest. Drop acid to commune with the divine? Have at it. But it's not okay to harm your children out of irrational belief. Not even when you try to pin your decisions on God.
And it's good that the court system is starting to be less hands-off with those parents who do.
* As reported in the linked Yahoo story.
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