Do your state laws protect parents who allow their
children to die without medical care because of their religious beliefs? Until
recently I was not sure how this question should be answered for my own
state-- and just as a reminder for
readers outside the U.S., the 50 states
have differing laws on many topics, so knowing one state’s position does not
tell you what happens in other states.
Ordinarily, a failure to provide medical care for a
child when it is desperately needed would be considered a criminal matter of
neglect and abuse. Civil suits against the parents might also be a possibility.
But some states provide religious exemptions to parents who cite religious
beliefs such as commitment to the power of prayer as justification for a
failure to seek medical care for a child. As far as these parents are
concerned, prayer or similar activities are the treatment they should give, and
in fact to do otherwise indicates the weakness of their faith in God and
endangers their souls and those of their children.
I’m indebted for information about this to CHILD,
Inc. (www.childrenshealthcare.org),
and to a map displaying the legal positions of the states at www.vocativ.com/culture/religion/faith-healing-deaths/?page=all
. (This map is based on data drawn from childrenshealthcare.org.)
You can probably look at the map graphic yourself,
but I am going to describe the similar positions taken by groups of states. By
the way, as you will see, this does not play out geographically exactly as one
might guess.
Let me point out first that six states allow no
religious exemptions to either criminal or civil charges involving abuse and
neglect. These forward-thinking states are the following: Hawaii, Oregon, Nebraska,
North Carolina, Maryland, and Massachusetts. (Boo, New Jersey! I had expected
better of you!)
Twelve states allow no criminal exemptions, but they
do allow religious exemptions in the case of civil suits resulting from neglect
or abuse of children. Exemptions in civil suits may discourage child protective
services from pursuing a case at the civil level, which requires a less stringent
proof than criminal cases do. The states that allow these religious exemptions
to civil suits are these: New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Michigan,
Illinois, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Vermont, and Florida. Parents
who fail to provide medical care to very sick children for religious reasons are
liable for criminal prosecution, which has a high standard of proof, but not
for civil actions, with their lower standard.
Fourteen states allow religious exemptions only in
criminal cases involving misdemeanors like a non-felony level of child
endangerment, not in cases of murder or manslaughter. These states are:
California, Nevada, Colorado, South Dakota, Kansas, Missouri, Mississippi,
Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, New York, New Hampshire, and Maine. In those states, there are no religious exemptions
for civil suits related to incidents of neglect or abuse.
Nine states allow religious exemptions to
prosecution for felony crimes against children, in which sexual assaults are
included, as are child endangerment and neglect. These states are: Washington,
Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Tennessee, West
Virginia, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.
Finally, almost unbelievably, there are six states
that allow religious exemptions to prosecution for negligent homicide, manslaughter,
and even capital murder. These are: Idaho, Iowa, Arkansas, Louisiana, Ohio, and
Indiana.
The reasons for the broad religious exemptions in
this last group of states presumably have to do with the proportion of their
populations who want to choose faith-healing over standard medical care,
probably for themselves, but most relevantly for their children. The most
obvious community for these people to belong to is Christian Science, but there
are a wide variety of other faith-healing-oriented groups like Followers of Christ
or Church of the First Born. Charismatic churches in general are committed to
the principle that once “born again”, Christians can have access to the gifts
of the Holy Spirit, including discernment (diagnosis) and exorcism or deliverance
(expulsion of the demons responsible for both physical and mental illness).
Like other people, these groups of believers are attracted to areas where there
are many of their co-religionists, and as they increase in number move into a
position where they can influence state laws. In addition, of course, once laws
have created religious exemptions for child abuse and neglect, even more such
believers will arrive. This process helps to establish the polarization
responsible for the current “culture wars” in the U.S.
One more point: this blog usually focuses on issues
that have to do with child development from a psychological viewpoint. Do
religious exemptions to abuse and neglect charges play a role in those issues?
I think they probably do, although child deaths are much less likely even in
alternative psychotherapies than they are in cases of medical need. However, injuries
short of fatality may still be considered abusive. Religious views seem
implicated in the apparent use of Attachment Therapy at the Seventh Day
Adventist school, Miracle Meadows, in West Virginia (see above, by the way).
There is considerable overlap between the authoritarian views held by some
religious groups and those held by practitioners of Attachment Therapy. If
practitioners or parents claim that religious beliefs are the justification of
child mistreatment as a psychotherapeutic or educational method , there are a
number of states in which this reasoning will help them evade prosecution.
There was little discussion of these issues during
the successful efforts to ban “conversion therapy” in California and New
Jersey. This may have been because only mental health professionals are
prohibited from doing this treatment, and then the ban involves minor clients
only. Parents and clergypersons can go ahead and use “conversion therapy” if
they want to--- but perhaps one day an affected minor will grow up able to
prove that he or she was harmed, and we will see whether courts accept the
religious exemption then.