Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (37 page)

As in many such cases, the parents showed a curious lack of affect and remorse for what they had done. In a press conference after Ashley's death, her mother compared her daughter's fear of being hospitalized to Anne Frank's anguish about her deportation to Auschwitz. Catherine King added, “I know I was a good mother, and no judge or jury in the country can convince me otherwise.” In contrast, the county attorney who filed charges against the Kings said, “Any person who calls himself a Christian wouldn't let a dog die like this.” But it was precisely
because
the Kings were members of a Christian sect, one with beliefs about healing, that Ashley died in misery. Had the Kings been atheists, there was a good chance she would have lived.

I've read about dozens of these cases, and their common elements are two: no serious punishment of the parents, and those parents' lack of regret. Both, I think, are due to faith. Most states have no legal grounds to prosecute parents like Ashley's; in those where they can be put on trial, juries are reluctant to convict and judges reluctant to punish. But that occurs only when the abuse has a religious excuse. I attribute the lack of affect in the parents to religion as well: the belief that the pain, suffering, and death of their children are far less important than not violating the tenets of their
faith. Their conviction that they did what God or their church demands immunizes such parents against normal feelings of guilt and shame.

While there are reams of similar stories about the deaths of children after Christian Science “treatment,” many other, more marginal sects also reject medical care in favor of prayer. This dogma invariably rests on passages in the Bible such as James 5:13–15:

Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him sing psalms.
Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord:
And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.

Medical advances have been incalculably large since those words were written, but our children continue to suffer and die on the basis of ancient texts—and from the peer pressure exerted by coreligionists. The many sects that rely on prayer treatment often shun or expel members caught going to doctors.

Jehovah's Witnesses, numbering nearly eight million worldwide, routinely refuse blood transfusion, citing biblical passages like Genesis 9:4 (“But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat”) and Leviticus 17:10 (“I will even set my face against that soul who eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people”). Many adults and children have died from a metaphorical interpretation of “eating blood,” although transfusing some
components
of blood, like the protein hemoglobin, is now permitted.
The children who have died
, brainwashed by their parents into refusing blood, are celebrated by Jehovah's Witnesses as martyrs: a copy of the church's magazine
Awake!
from May 1994 shows pictures of twenty-five of these children with the chilling caption “Youths who put God first.”

These completely avoidable deaths continue to mount.
In 1998, Seth Asser and Rita Swan
tried to measure the toll in a paper published in the medical journal
Pediatrics
. Their aim was to determine how many children had died from religiously based medical neglect in the twenty years after 1975, and how many could have been saved. To that total they added mortalities of
fetuses and infants during and shortly after birth when doctors and midwives were barred on religious grounds. Of course, determining after the fact
whether medical intervention would have saved lives is a judgment call, but in many cases, including childhood diabetes, ruptured appendixes, and breech births, medical intervention is nearly always successful.

The results were both startling and depressing. Of 172 children who died over those two decades after being denied medical care on religious grounds, 140—81 percent of the total—had conditions that would have been curable with a probability of greater than 90 percent. Another 18 (10 percent) had a probability of cure greater than 50 percent but less than 90 percent. Only 3 (victims of a car accident, a severe heart defect, and anencephaly) would not have benefited from medical attention. Asser and Swan's list of examples is heartbreaking; here are but three:

For example, a 2-year-old child aspirated a bite of banana. Her parents frantically called other members of her religious circle for prayer during nearly an hour in which some signs of life were still present.

One teenager asked teachers for help getting medical care for fainting spells, which she had been refused at home. She ran away from home, but law enforcement returned her to the custody of her father. She died 3 days later from a ruptured appendix.

One father had a medical degree and had completed a year of residency before joining a church opposed to medical care. After 4 days of fever, his 5-month-old son began having apneic episodes. The father told the coroner that with each spell he “rebuked the spirit of death” and the infant “perked right back up and started breathing.” The infant died the next day from bacterial meningitis.

Both mothers and fetuses have died after refusing to have doctors or midwives present at childbirth. Is there anything other than faith—or complete ignorance of medicine—that could have caused the following gruesome scene?

In one case, a 23-year-old woman presented to an emergency room after 56 hours of active labor with the infant's head at the vaginal opening for 16 hours. The dead fetus was delivered via emergency cesarean, and was in an advanced state of decomposition. The mother died within hours after delivery from sepsis because of the retained uterine contents. The medical examiner noted that the corpse of the infant was so foul smelling that it was inconceivable anyone attending the delivery could not have noticed.

The believers in these cases were not just Christian Scientists (16 percent of the total deaths), but represented twenty-three Christian denominations from thirty-four states.

Such deaths are unconscionable because they involve children who have no say—or no mature say—in their own medical care, but are at the mercy of their parents' beliefs. Because injuring a child by withholding medical care for
nonreligious
reasons constitutes legal child abuse, it's hard to make the case that it's not equally abusive when medical care is rejected on religious grounds. In such light, Jesus's statement in Matthew (19:14)—“Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven”—has a horrible double meaning.

It's not just the parents
who are at fault. Religious exemptions are written into law by the federal and state governments—that is, those who represent all Americans. In fact, thirty-eight of the fifty states have religious exemptions for child abuse and neglect in their civil codes, fifteen states have such exemptions for misdemeanors, seventeen for felony crimes against children, and five (Idaho, Iowa, Ohio, West Virginia, and Arkansas) have exemptions for manslaughter, murder, or capital murder. Altogether, forty-three of the fifty states confer some type of civil or criminal immunity on parents who injure their children by withholding medical care on religious grounds.

Surprisingly, these exemptions were
required
by the U.S. government in 1974 as a condition for states to receive federal aid for child protection. Before that, only eleven states had such exemptions; afterward there were forty-four. (That requirement was rescinded in 1983, but it was too late: most states had enacted the religious exemptions, which are still in place.)
The government, or rather the taxpayers, further support religious child abuse by subsidizing Christian Science practitioners and their nursing homes with Medicare and tax exemptions—despite their complete failure to provide
any
medical care. Other tax support involves allowing federal employees, some state employees, and members of the armed forces to join health plans that include Christian Science nursing and practitioner care.

The tangle of laws, in which parents in some states can be exculpated from abuse or neglect but convicted of manslaughter, has led to mass confusion in the courts. The result is that when parents are found guilty of medically neglecting their children on religious grounds, their convictions can be thrown out of court because of conflicting laws. Or when parents
are
convicted, religiously based sympathy for them results in trivial punishments, usually probation or a small fine. Only rarely do such parents go to jail. This unwarranted sympathy for faith eliminates the stiff sentences that might deter other parents from using religious healing on their children.

It's not just medical care that's subject to religious exemption in America. You can, on religious grounds alone, refuse to have your newborn children tested for metabolic diseases or given prophylactic eyedrops. You can refuse to have your children tested for lead in their blood. In Oregon and Pennsylvania there are even religious exemptions from wearing bicycle helmets. In California, public school teachers can refuse to be tested for tuberculosis on religious grounds, which, of course, could endanger their students.

Religious exemptions for vaccinations, allowed in forty-eight of the fifty U.S. states (all except Mississippi and West Virginia), endanger not only the children who don't get immunized, but the community in general, for even those who are vaccinated don't always acquire immunity. To attend public schools and many colleges, like the one where I teach, students must show evidence of vaccination for diseases like hepatitis, measles, mumps, diphtheria, and tetanus. The only exemptions permitted are for medical reasons, like a compromised immune system—and religion.

Nor are Christians the only believers who oppose immunization.
Islamic clerics in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria
urge their followers to oppose polio vaccination, declaring it a conspiracy to sterilize Muslims. These efforts may prevent the complete eradication of polio from the human species, something already achieved for smallpox. Dr. A. Majid Katme,
spokesman and former head of the Islamic Medical Association of the United Kingdom, described by the
Guardian
as “
a respected figure
in the British Muslim community,” has come out against
all
childhood vaccination, claiming that “
the case of vaccination
is first an Islamic one, based on Islamic ethos regarding the perfection of the natural human body's immune defense system, empowered by great and prophetic guidance to avoid most infections.” Taking his advice would, of course, be disastrous.

Few records are kept on
adult
deaths caused by religious “healing,” but we can get an idea of the problem from
a study of childbirth in women
belonging to the Faith Assembly, an antimedical religious group in Indiana. Not only was mortality of late fetuses and early newborns three times higher than for the state as a whole, but the
maternal
mortality rate during childbirth was ninety-two times higher!

Of course, nobody considers prosecuting adults who favor spiritual treatment for themselves over modern medicine, as they are presumed capable of making their own decisions, however foolish. Yet their choices may not be as free as we think. For many of the parents who withhold medical care from their children once
were
those children, raised in the faith and indoctrinated in its tenets. Of course, the Kings should have been punished more severely than they were, both to prevent them from repeating their behavior and to deter others from imitating it, but it's hard to argue that parents raised in such a faith are completely free to reject what was drilled into them when they were young and credulous.

I have dwelt on medical exemptions because they clearly show the conflict between science and faith, as well as the grievous harm that this can cause. Medicine can cure; faith cannot. But such faith need not be religious.
In 2013
, Tamara Sophie Lovett, a Canadian, was charged with negligence for treating her seven-year-old son Ryan, severely infected with streptococcus, with homeopathic and herbal remedies. Although such infections can usually be cured easily with a dose of penicillin, Ryan didn't have that option, and died. What killed him was not religious faith, but faith in alternative medicine. As one investigating officer said, “We have no direct information that religious beliefs factored into this, but there was a belief system and homeopathic medicine did factor in.” Faith is faith, and in this case it too conflicted with science.

While the conflict between creationism and evolution reduces Americans' scientific literacy, nobody dies from not learning about evolution. Faith-based healing is a different matter. A single child killed in the name of faith is one too many. How many will it take before we realize that our exaggerated respect for religion will allow these deaths to continue indefinitely? The case of the Kings, and others like it, is a good example of Steven Weinberg's argument that “for good people to do evil—that takes religion”—or sometimes just faith.

Many of the parents who injure or kill their children through medical neglect are not toothless Bible-thumpers, nor even biblical fundamentalists. Many, like Christian Scientists, can even been seen as religious “moderates”—a group that, accommodationists claim, are relatively harmless, or even helpful as allies in the fight against creationism.

But Americans of even liberal faiths—which can include the legislators who write religious exemptions and tax breaks into laws, the believers who lobby for such laws (even if they don't endorse faith healing), and the prosecutors and judges who are reluctant to prosecute such cases, or dole out light sentences upon conviction—all are complicit in the death of those children. Sadly, the
real
guilty parties, the churches that promulgate faith healing, are always exempt from punishment. Political pressure—the “antireligion” characterization that would attach to American politicians who lobby against religious exemptions—prevents any movement to repeal these unfair and harmful laws.