Children die of faith healing while we debate the law

At Get Religion, E.E. Evans writes:

If parents were sentenced and jailed for stupidity or poor medical care, there wouldn’t be room for most of the other criminals. And, as Terry also pointed out, you can’t stop faith-healing parents from having children.

Children are dying and will continue to die on the field of parental faith and neglect, deprived of any possibility of making an informed and independent decision.

Remember Madeline Kara Neumann, 11, whose parents allowed her to die from an altogether treatable form of diabetes on March 23, 2008?

They lost one appeal and were sentenced this week. The father, Dale Neumann, and the mother, Leilani Neumann, received one month in prison once a year for six years and ten years probation. And their attorney says plan to appeal the sentence "because state law is not clear on the issue of spiritual treatment."

Thus the legal debate continues, as does our collective leniency. Shawn Peters, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and an expert on religion and the law, told the New York Times:

The sentences tend to be halfway punishments where you have relatively mild penalties imposed on parents who are found to be legally guilty of having caused a child’s death. It underscores how uneasy we are both politically and culturally when it comes to regulating religious conduct even when the consequences are disastrous.

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Regarding humanity and justice, however, Cornell law professor Sherry F. Colb wrote:

. . . There is no justification for child abuse and neglect, no matter how sincere the parent's religious motivation. To take an example from the Bible, Abraham should not have prepared to kill his son Isaac, no matter what he believed the divine will to be. Though he may have "passed" the test of his faith, in other words, he would plainly fail the test of parenthood and of membership in any civilized modern community.

How should the law respond when religious faith leads to the reckless homicide of a child?

Kara Neumann, age 11, died last March of treatable juvenile diabetes after her Wausau, Wisconsin, parents chose to pray for her recovery rather than take her to a doctor. Her parents face criminal charges. Cornell law professor Sherry F. Colb, addressing how the law might react, writes:

. . . There is no justification for child abuse and neglect, no matter how sincere the parent's religious motivation. To take an example from the Bible, Abraham should not have prepared to kill his son Isaac, no matter what he believed the divine will to be. Though he may have "passed" the test of his faith, in other words, he would plainly fail the test of parenthood and of membership in any civilized modern community.

Beginning there, we have three courses of action the law may follow:

• First, attack the legitimacy of religious exemptions in laws that prohibit child abuse or neglect. That would expose parents like the Neumanns to the full force of the law.
• Second, excuse or partially excuse (perhaps reducing the severity of the charge) the parent who fails to seek out medical care for his child because of a faith in prayer or other divine agency. That does not to justify a parent's action, but it does temper justice with mercy.
• Third, agree that when people believe in good faith that they are carrying out the mandates of heaven, they should not be punished, thus opening children to all manner of abuse in the real or imagined name of faith.

Writing for FindLaw, Colb says:

If our focus is on the future, it might seem most prudent to prosecute the Neumanns to the full extent of the law and send the message that parents must care for their children. The very existence of the Wisconsin prayer exception to the child abuse or neglect statute arguably invites what most of us would view as intolerable misconduct.

More merciful and more likely, as she suggests, is an outcome which takes into consideration the parents' obvious religious faith. Whether the other children of that union are left in their parents' potentially deadly care may yet be the principal question the court answers.

To fully appreciate the complexity of the issues raised in this heart-rending case, please read the entire piece.