Another death in Oregon

Steve Mayes of The Oregonian is reporting another possible child death among the Followers of Christ, a faith-healing church implicated in dozens of cases of religion-based medical neglect over the past several decades. Mayes has learned that authorities in Clackamas County, Oregon, are investigating the death over this past weekend of a newborn whose parents are members of the church. According to Mayes's reporting for the Oregonian, "Authorities said the child died without receiving emergency medical treatment, a scenario that has played out many times among members of the Followers of Christ church."

What makes these newest revelations about the Followers even more disturbing is the fact such deaths apparently do not typically result in criminal prosecutions. "Clackamas County investigators have responded to at least three cases in the past 10 years involving Followers of Christ church members whose newborn children lived less than one day," Mayes writes for the Portland daily. "None of the prior infant deaths resulted in prosecution."

60 days in jail for father in Oregon faith healing case

Carl Worthington, convicted of criminal mistreatment for his role in the death of his daughter, has received a sentence of 60 days in jail, the Associated Press has reported (accessible here). As part of his sentence, Worthington also must provide medical care for his surviving children. (He will remain on probation for five years as well.)

In sentencing Worthington, Judge Steven Maurer said, "Make no mistake, this is a serious crime. The defendant left his vulnerable and defenseless daughter in harm's way."

In a case that drew national attention, Worthington and his wife were acquitted of more serious charges of second-degree manslaughter for their alleged roles in the death of their 15-month old daughter, Ava, on March 2, 2008. The girl suffered from bronchopneumonia and a blood infection; what's more, a cyst on her neck might have limited her breathing and ability to eat. Her parents, citing the tenets of their religious faith, chose not to take her to a doctor but rather treated her by spiritual means alone.

Recap of the the Worthington case

Steve Mayes, a reporter for the Oregonian in Portland, has written a thoughtful recap of the Worthington faith-healing trial. His piece, syndicated through Religion News Service, ran in The Salt Lake Tribune, among other places (accessible here).

Mayes's piece quotes a number of experts (including me) about the broader meaning of the prosecution of the Worthington parents, who were acquitted on the most serious charges leveled at them for their alleged roles in the death of their daughter. (Carl Worthington was convicted of criminal mistreatment, a misdemeanor.)

Mayes concludes (rightly, I think): "As the Worthington case showed, juries can be reluctant to convict deeply religious, loving and otherwise law-abiding parents who withhold medical attention on religious grounds. In addition, a conviction is no guarantee that determined believers will change."

Dale Neumann found guilty in faith healing case

After deliberating for 15 hours, a jury in Marathon County, Wisconsin, found Dale Neumann guilty of second-degree reckless homicide in connection with the March 2008 death of his 11-year-old daughter, Kara. Neumann's wife, Leilani, was convicted on similar charges earlier this year. Coverage of the verdict from the Wausau Daily Herald can be found here.

In the past few days, I've been interviewed numerous times about the verdict, and what I think it means. I've generally said that I'm convinced that now, with two convictions in the case, the legal battle is really only half over. The Neumanns still have to be sentenced, and their respective convictions will be appealed. Purely as a matter of law, I think that they will be able to raise some compelling issues on appeal because of the presence in Wisconsin's criminal of an apparent exemption from prosecution for parents who engaged in spiritual healing practices. I'm convinced that this issue (whether or not the Neumann's right to due process of law was violated) will wind up being resolved by the state supreme court in Madison.

RNS "10 Minutes With . . ." Feature

I'm featured for a second time in the Religion News Service's "10 Minutes With . . ." feature, which is accessible here. The interview (which I did last week) focuses mainly on the aftermath of the Worthington trial in Oregon.

When asked, for instance, about the potential ramifications of the verdicts in the Worthington case, I told RNS, "It remains to be seen what the implications will be, both in Oregon and nationally. It surprises me because Oregon had revamped its laws to make it easier to prosecute parents. This was going to be the first test of that revamped law, and the first test did not work. It demonstrates how unsettled these legal and ethical questions remain even though the courts have been grappling with them for over 100 years."

Leilani Neumann found guilty

Last Friday, a Marathon County, Wisconsin, jury found Leilani Neumann guilty of second degree reckless homicide for her role in the 2008 death of her 11-year old daughter, Kara. The girl died of diabetic ketoacidosis, a complication of diabetes, after being denied the conventional medical treatment that almost certainly would have saved her life; her parents chose to treat her through prayer alone.

Leilani Neumann faces up to 25 years in prison, but, having studied hundreds of similar cases dating back to the 1800's, I'm doubtful that she'll serve even a fraction of that. In their sentencing decisions, judges in these cases tend to treat parents leniently, perhaps because those adults do not seem to have been trying to intentionally harm their children. It's possible (although by no means guaranteed) that Neumann will be placed on probation and, in an extension of a court mandate that's already in place, ordered to provide her surviving children with medical treatment. A prison sentence of more than two years is highly unlikely.

Her attorney, Gene Linehan, told reporters that he plans to appeal the verdict, and that one of the main issues in that challenge will be the judge's ruling that he could not call a Texas-based faith-healer as an "expert" witness. I'm not sure that this will be the strongest issue, especially since Linehan (inexplicably, in my assessment) wound up not calling any witnesses or presenting any evidence after the prosecution rested its case. I understand his rationale -- there was nothing more to be added to the jury's understanding of Leilani's motives and actions -- but the strategy might backfire when an appellate court scrutinizes how the defense was impacted by not being allowed to call the "expert" to the stand. (I hate to be blunt, but there's no way in the world that this verdict will be overturned on those grounds.)

I'm still of the opinion that Leilani Neumann's most promising line of appeal would be to make a claim that her right to due process of law was violated by the presence of the "treatment through prayer" provision in the state's child abuse and neglect laws. She was not charged under that statute, but she easily could point to its presence in the criminal code as a source of confusion: Was she supposed to believe that she could engage in faith healing practices (as appears to be the case under the "treatment through prayer" stipulation), or that she could not engage in them (as now appears to be the case under the second degree reckless homicide law)? This is not a particularly sexy legal issue, but, judging from the other cases in which it has been raised, it has the most merit.

Washington Times piece on the Hauser and Neumann cases

Andrea Billups of the Washington Times has written a thoughtful piece about the complicated legal and ethical issues raised by the Neumann and Hauser faith healing cases. She did a great job of summarizing my views in the article, which is accessible here.

PBS program "Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly" focuses on faith healing cases

A recent segment of the PBS program "Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly" was devoted to faith healing cases in Wisconsin and Oregon. It featured a variety of experts (including me and Rita Swan of the advocacy group CHILD) as well as a representative of the Christian Science Church, Joe Farkas. The show is viewable online here

Will faith healing "expert" testify at Neumann trial?

WAOW-TV in Wausau, WI, is reporting on an interesting development in the Kara Neumann case. (The full story is accessible here.)

Neumann's mother, Leilani, goes on trial this week for her role in the girl's faith-healing-related death in 2007. Her attorney, Gene Linehan, apparently wants to buttress his case by calling as an "expert" witness a Texas minister named Thurman Scrivner.

To justify calling Scrivner to the stand, Linehan said, according to the WAOW report, "Our theory on that is that the state is working on a medical model, saying that medical help should have been obtained prior to Kara's death. Our theory is that faith healing is a legitimate exercise of discretion that a reasonable person in the faith community would exercise and that it is successful."

Scrivner apparently leads something called the Living Savior Ministries (see Web site here).

Scrivner's ministry offers "healing schools" in Texas and several other locations. They are advertised as follows:

"The Bible says that God's Word is His medicine. Before your arrival, you can begin to take God's medicine every day by speaking it aloud and meditating on healing scriptures and confessions. At TLSM Healing Schools, we're dedicated to doing the works of Jesus. The Bible says that Jesus 'went about doing good, and healing . . .' (Acts 10:38). We believe our job is to follow Christ's example and deliver those same good works. Come work with our team to obtain your victory!"

(Interestingly for the context of the Neumann case, a photo of a small child appears on the Web page touting these healing workshops.)

Mother Jones article on faith healing cases

With the first of the Neumann trials beginning this week (jury selection in Leilani Neumann's trial begins on Thursday, May 14), there promises to be renewed media coverage of the legal and ethical issues implicated in cases when children die after being denied, because of their parents' religious beliefs, conventional medical treatment.

A case in point is Deena Guzder's story "Should Parents Who Call God Instead of the Doctor Be Punished?" in the current issue of Mother Jones (accessible here).

TIME article on faith healing cases

TIME's Deena Guzder has written a concise piece on recent faith healing deaths -- most prominently, that of Kara Neumann in Wisconsin last Easter Sunday -- and the criminal litigation that continues to unfold (accessible here). "When Parents Call God Instead of the Doctor" is among several recent articles in national publications tracking the phenomenon of religion-based medical neglect of children.

Interfaith Voices appearance

I'm one of this week's guests on the nationally-syndicated radio program "Interfaith Voices" (program accessible here). My segment is entitled "Faith Healing: Miraculous Cure or Deadly Gamble?"

LRB materials document origins of "Christian Science exception"

Below are documents from Wisconsin's Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB) showing how the Christian Science Church literally wrote the controversial faith healing exemption now contained in Chapter 948 of the Wisconsin code.


LRB Document 1

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When Christian Science Fails (Part One)

As Wisconsin lawmakers and their constituents debate changing Chapter 948, the portion of the state code covering "Crimes Against Children," representatives of the Christian Science Church have touted their faith's purported devotion to insuring that children receive "effective health care," as spokesman Joe Farkas has put it.

In the interests of having a full, frank, and open public debate about how the state's abuse and neglect laws might be revised to better serve children, I thought I would share some of my scholarly findings regarding Christian Science's track record in providing "effective health care." I will post here a series of relevant excerpts from my recent book When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law (Oxford University Press, 2007). These copyrighted passage come from Chapter Six, " 'The Pain Has No Right to Exist': Contemporary Christian Scientists in the Courts."

On January 29, 1959, a fifty-eight-year -old man named Edward Whitney strode into an office on the eighth floor of Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, a neo-Georgian building located on Michigan Avenue. Once inside, Whitney pulled a .32 caliber pistol from his overcoat and brandished it at William Rubert, a Christian Science practitioner who had unsuccessfully treated his daughter more than two decades earlier. “How would you like to die?” the enraged Whitney said as he leveled the gun at Rubert. “You murdered my little girl.” With that, Whitney began firing. He hit Rubert three times—doctors later removed bullets from his chest and right hand and arm—as the victim sprang from his desk and ran down a hallway toward an elevator. (“That wasn’t so bad,” Whitney later said of his aim, “for a man who doesn’t know anything about guns.”)

Whitney and Rubert had a tangled relationship that dated back to 1937. In December of that year, Whitney’s daughter, Audrey Kay, fell sick with diabetes while her father was away on a business trip. The relative in whose care Whitney had left his daughter was a Christian Scientist, and she took the girl to Rubert for treatment. Although a regimen of insulin shots likely would have saved Audrey Kay’s life, Rupert Rubert relied solely on Christian Science practices in an effort to remove the purported “illusion” of the girl’s illness. This treatment failed, and Audrey Kay died. Whitney, livid over his daughter’s death, pressed authorities to bring manslaughter charges against Rubert, but a jury acquitted the practitioner in 1938. Despite Whitney’s repeated calls for the case to be reopened, authorities chose not to revisit it. Whitney, now desperate to bring Rubert to justice, accosted Dwight Green, the governor of Illinois, at a public appearance in 1941 and urged him to investigate the circumstances of his daughter’s death. (Green ignored him, but the police did not: they arrested Whitney after the confrontation.)

Audrey Kay’s death haunted Whitney, and he brooded over the fact that Rubert had, in his view, gotten away with murder. With all official channels apparently closed, he eventually decided to take matters into his own hands. Whitney made no secret of his intentions: in the mid-1940’s, he mailed the practitioner a letter that read in part, “I will return to Chicago and when I do, I will hunt you like the beast you are and kill you with as little mercy as was shown to [my daughter].” This grim promise so distressed Rupert Rubert that he contacted local authorities, and eventually Whitney was charged in federal court with using the mails to threaten the practitioner’s life. Perhaps sympathetic to Whitney’s plight as a distraught father, a jury acquitted him.

Early in 1959, Whitney resolved to make good on his threat. He spent $27.50 on a .32 caliber pistol and traveled from his home in Birmingham, Alabama, to Chicago. After waiting 21 twenty-one years to exact his revenge on Rubert, Whitney proved to be a determined assailant. When he confronted Rubert at the latter’s office, in the Opera HouseOrchestra Hall, the Christian Scientist bolted down a hallway toward an elevator operated by a man named Francis Houston. Already wounded, he exclaimed to Houston, “My god, he’s shooting at me!” Rubert might have assumed that he had at last reached safety when the elevator’s glass doors closed, but Whitney literally shattered that illusion by firing one last shot through them.

As the elevator reached the building’s lobby, Houston told Rubert, “I’ll call a doctor.” This notion was, of course, anathema for a practitioner of Christian Science, and he Rubert responded, “No, no doctor!” Perhaps fortunately for Rubert, the police officers who soon converged on the scene ignored his demand and parceled him off to Presbyterian-St. Luke’s hospital. There, doctors removed all three bullets that had lodged in Rubert’s body and stabilized his condition. (When asked to comment on this apparent breach of Christian Science practice, a church spokesman later said that emergency operations did not violate its proscription of medical treatment.)

Whitney fled the Opera Housethe scene Orchestra Hall after the shooting, but he quickly surrendered himself and his gun to a traffic policeman stationed at a nearby street corner. When police questioned him, Whitney made no attempt to conceal his role in the shooting or his motive. “I shot him and intended to kill him,” he said. “I did it because he killed my daughter.” This admission apparently did not hurt Whitney when he was tried later that year for attempted murder. “The temper of public sentiment,” according to one account of the case, “was reflected in this heartbroken man’s prompt acquittal by a Chicago jury.”

Following a period of intense activity around the turn of the century, there was in the mid-20th twentieth century a relative lull in prominent manslaughter and neglect cases involving Christian Scientists. (This reflected the overall downturn in outside scrutiny of the church that followed the death of the ever-controversial Mary Baker Eddy in 1910.) The post-–World War II era, however, witnessed a notable upsurge in such litigation. The saga of Edward Whitney’s vendetta against William Rubert (replete with sordid details seemingly borrowed from one of the era’s pulp novels) helped to inaugurate an era in which church members faced intensifying scrutiny from the general public and the courts because of their healing practices. Over the final third of the 20th twentieth century, a succession of deaths of children who had been treated in accordance with Christian Science principles resulted in high-profile manslaughter and neglect prosecutions of parents, as well as civil actions filed against both individual church members and the “Mother Church” of Christian Science in Boston.

It is intriguing to note that this trend paralleled an exceptional growth throughout the United States in medical medical-malpractice litigation. The legal historian Lawrence Friedman has suggested that the increase in medical medical-liability claims filed in the latter part of the 20th twentieth century was rooted in part in a growing expectation among the general public that the courts should provide redress to individuals who have been denied the presumably certain benefits of modern medicine by incompetent or negligent physicians. A similar expectation seems to have driven the late-century rise in prosecutions of (and, to a lesser extent, civil suits filed by individuals against) Christian Scientists implicated in cases of religion-based medical neglect of children. With dramatic advances demonstrating almost daily the remarkable benefits of medical science, those who denied medical treatment to the sick or injured—whether out of professional incompetence or religious fervor—increasingly were perceived as legally culpable.

Other broad trends influenced and complicated these later Christian Science cases. Starting with the Jehovah’s Witness cases of the World War II era, judicial protections for religious practice grew steadily throughout the middle part of the 20th twentieth century, with the U.S. Supreme Court handing down a series of opinions that made it increasingly difficult for states to regulate religious conduct. This development culminated in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), in which the high court ruled in favor of Old Order Amish parents who had resisted, on religious grounds, the application to their children of a state law mandating school attendance. There followed, however, a prolonged period of retrenchment in which the Supreme Court chipped away at legal protections for religious conduct. In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), for instance, the high court gutted one of the central holdings in Yoder by ruling that states did not have to demonstrate that they possessed a “compelling interest” in regulating religious behavior. The Supreme Court did not rule in a case directly related to spiritual spiritual-healing rites in this tumultuous period, but its evolving First Amendment jurisprudence suggested that statutes could pass constitutional muster if they exhibited surface neutrality toward religion. Under this relatively permissive standard, there was no significant constitutional barrier to the application of manslaughter and neglect laws to Christian Scientists who had engaged in religious religious-healing practices.

But even in the later part of the twentieth century, prosecutions of some Christian Scientists for religion-based medical neglect often produced ambiguous results that often left both the church and its critics unsatisfied. Although broader legal trends regarding medical liability and state regulation of religious conduct seemed to cast a long shadow over their legal claims, church members could fall back on one particularly effective defense: specific provisions in state manslaughter and neglect statutes that appeared to exempt conduct grounded in sincerely- held religious beliefs. The impediments posed by these little-known stipulations—many of which were added in the mid-1970s to state criminal codes at the behest of the federal government—infuriated prosecutors, confounded appellate courts, and precipitated calls from children’s welfare advocates for their repeal.

Christian Scientists, still holding fast to their religious beliefs, continued to view state regulation of their healing practices as a dire threat to their faith, and they battled it fervently. Often with the assistance of lawyers dispatched by the Mother Church in Boston, individual Christian Scientists zealously defended themselves in court against criminal charges and civil suits. Church leaders further bolstered these piecemeal defenses of the faith by extolling the virtues of Christian Science in a public relations campaign that included newspaper columns, television appearances, and public testimony. As time passed, however, and young Christian Scientists continued to die as a direct result of their church’s approach to healing, the defenses marshaled by church members—that the Constitution defended their religious practices, that Christian Science was every bit as effective as medical science in treating illness, that the state had no business meddling in the relationship between parents and their children—rang more and more hollow.

Wisconsin LRB records: Christian Scientists wrote faith healing exemption

[Note: I originally made this posting on Monday, Jan. 26. It somewhat inexplicably disappeared on Weds., Jan. 28, so I'm reposting it.]

The Christian Science Church currently is lobbying to change provisions related to faith healing contained in Chapter 948, the section of the Wisconsin code outlining "crimes against children." What’s curious about the church’s efforts is that, according to records housed at the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau in Madison, Christian Scientists were the driving force behind the creation of those very same legal provisions in 1987.

I spent a good portion of the morning of Monday, January 26, in the LRB’s library in Madison. I reviewed dozens of pages of microfiche records contained in the drafting history of the “treatment through prayer” section of Chapter 948 -- officially, s. 948.03 (6). That provision states: “A person is not guilty of an offense solely because he or she provides as child with treatment by spiritual means through prayer alone for healing in accordance with the religious method of healing permitted under s. 48.981 (3) (c) 4. or 44.03 (6) in lieu of medical or surgical treatment.” As I have written in my book When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law (Oxford, 2007), such exemptions often stymie prosecutions of parents who, citing religious reasons, fail to provide appropriate medical treatment for their sick or injured children.

LRB records (which I hope to scan and post here shortly) clearly show that in 1987, Wisconsin lawmakers adopted this measure at the urging of the Christian Science Church – the same church that now claims the exemption should be removed as means of safeguarding the health of children. The church's role in the legislation was so prominent that the drafting records repeatedly reference the "Christian Science exception" (or the "CS exception") for faith healing practices.

Included in the LRB records are letters from George E. Jeffrey of the Christian Science Committee on Publication (located in Milwaukee) to two state lawmakers, Senator Brian Rude and Rep. John D. Medinger. On February 27, 1987, Jeffrey wrote to Medinger and asked him to "please consider an amendment" to pending legislation "relating to abuse of children." Jeffrey did not leave anything to chance: he then spelled out "our suggested amendment" and indicated to Medinger where it could be inserted in the legislation then pending in the Assembly. The Christian Scientists' proposed provision read: "No person shall be guilty of an offense under this section for the sole reason he provides a child with treatment by spiritual means through prayer alone for healing in accordance with the religious method of healing permitted under the laws of this state in lieu of medical treatment." Jeffrey closed by indicating his unwavering support for the change, telling the lawmaker, "I would be happy to do what you feel in necessary to support the amendment through the legislative process."

Medinger acted on behalf of the church. LRB records indicate that it received a "drafting request" from Medinger on April 23, 1987. The request for the "Christian Science exemption" (as it was termed by the LRB on the form) showed that the lawmaker was "representing" George Jeffrey, the Christian Science official. In case that wasn't clear, appended to the request was Jeffrey's business card, which indicated that he worked for the Christian Science Committee on Publication for Wisconsin and gave his address and telephone number.

Rude received a similar letter from Jeffrey (apparently because the revamping of Chapter 948 wound up originating in the Senate rather than the Assembly). In it, the Christian Scientist urged Rude to "please consider sponsoring [an] amendment to Senate Bill 203," which overhauled Chapter 948. Again, Jeffrey was explicit in what the Christian Scientists wanted, offering "the new language" and directing Rude to where it could be inserted in the bill. The verbiage was similar to what he earlier had proposed to Medinger: "TREATMENT THROUGH PRAYER: A person is not guilty of an offense under this section solely because he or she in good faith selects and relies on prayer or other religious means for treatment of disease or for remedial care of the child."

Rude's office acted quickly after he received Jeffrey's request. On July 22, 1987, Laurie E. Smith, his legislative assistant, sent a memo to Bruce Feustal, a senior attorney at the LRB. The memo included the Christian Scientist's letter to Rude and indicated, "Senator Rude would like an amendment drafted which uses the language included in Mr. Jeffrey's letter."

And, indeed, the final version of the bill -- which has been law in Wisconsin for more than two decades, and which the Christian Science Church now wants to alter -- reflected almost verbatim the proposal made by Jeffrey to Medinger and Rude on behalf of the Christian Science Church. (The bill seemed to more closely reflect Jeffrey's communications with Medinger in that it included protection of spiritual healing offered "in lieu of medical treatment.")

New York Times article on Neumann case

Dirk Johnson on The New York Times has written a very thorough article on the Neumann faith healing case in Weston, Wisconsin (accessible here). I'm quoted about halfway through regarding the potential legal issues that might come into play as the case goes to trial.

Oregon faith-healing trials coming this spring

The Oregonian (link here) has reported that parents implicated in two apparent cases of religion-based medical neglect of children will be brought to trial in coming months in Oregon. (I've written about both of these cases in previous posts.)

First on trial (the date will be set on Jan. 26) will be the parents of Ava Worthington, who face charges of manslaughter and criminal mistreatment for their alleged roles in her death from pneumonia and blood infections last March. Then, in June, Jeffrey and Marci Beagley will be tried for criminally negligent homicide in the death of their 16-year-old son, Neil. Both sets of parents belong to the Followers of Christ Church, which has a long history of involvement in such cases in Oregon.

I'm especially gratified to see the Beagley case being brought to trial. Initially, it seemed as though local law enforcement would not file charges against the couple because Neil supposedly had been a "mature minor" capable of guiding his own health care. I wrote an op-ed piece for the Oregonian criticizing that posture (see my July 2 posting), and eventually charges were in fact filed.

When Christian Scientists lobby

Over the past few days, there have been a number of news reports highlighting the efforts of Christian Scientists to shape a revision of Wisconsin's child abuse and neglect laws. As it happens, in my book When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law (Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), I devoted considerable attention to similar efforts made by the church in other states. In the interests of helping to provide some much-needed historical context for the Christian Scientists' current lobbying efforts here in Madison, I thought I would post some relevant excerpts from the book. (All are copyrighted, of course.)

There were, for instance, the Christian Scientists' efforts in Massachusetts in the early 1990's:

[Advocates favoring the repeal of a faith healing exemption in Massachusetts] faced a formidable opponent: the Christian Science Church, which was headquartered in Boston and wielded considerable political clout in the state capitol. In an effort that would be repeated in several other states where religious exemptions came under fire, church representatives and their allies protested that any effort to remove statutory protections for spiritual-healing practices essentially would “make criminals of good families,” as one prominent Christian Scientist put it. Christian Scientists, they asserted, were not child abusers but rather caring parents, and they had adopted an approach to healing that was not only effective but also protected by both the federal and commonwealth constitutions. . . .

Energetic lobbying by Christian Scientists helped to stall attempts to repeal the religious exemption to Massachusetts’s child-abuse-and-neglect laws. In the fall of 1993, lawmakers took up the issue once more, and the church voiced its opposition with customary vigor. Warren Silvernail, legislative liaison for the church, asserted that “spiritual treatment is a right, a right we’ve proven we’ve been using responsibly” for over a century. Efforts to remove the religious exemption, he warned, left the church “in special jeopardy” because spiritual healing was so central to Christian Science. Church spokesman Victor Westberg made much the same point when he warned that lawmakers were on the verge of “legislating spiritual healing out of existence” by removing the religious exemption. Like Silvernail, Westberg cautioned that such a move represented a dire threat to the religious practices of tens of thousands of upstanding Christian Scientists. . . .


A similar course of events transpired in other states, Oregon in particular:

Although Maryland, Hawaii, and South Dakota also repealed apparent religious exemptions to their child-abuse-and-neglect laws, aggressive lobbying by Christian Scientists slowed or stalled the pace of reform in other states. Indiana, for instance, seemed primed for change in the early 1980s after a newspaper investigation revealed that dozens of children in the Faith Assembly church had died as a result of religion-based medical neglect. Responding to those reports, lawmakers made several attempts to clarify and strengthen state child-abuse laws by removing any apparent exemption for spiritual-healing practices. But, thanks largely to the opposition of Christian Scientists, such efforts repeatedly failed. “It was impossible to get it by the Christian Science Church,” one lawmaker later complained.

In Oregon, Christian Scientists actually succeeded in bolstering legal protections for their spiritual-healing practices. In 1995, shortly after the widely reported death of Tony Hays, lawmakers in Salem crafted a revision to the state’s criminal code that included more severe penalties for parents found guilty of murdering their children by abuse. Christian Scientists met on several occasions with the legislators and district attorneys who were drafting the revision, and they were able to add a provision that would allow parents charged with murder by abuse to claim as a defense that they had substituted spiritual-healing practices for medical treatment. The Oregonian later reported that church representatives had “played a behind-the-scenes role in getting the religious defense into the 1995 Oregon law,” an assertion confirmed by a district attorney who had helped draft the measure. “Our negotiation with them,” he said of the Christian Science lobbyists, “was to come up with language that left [church members] alone.”

Christian Scientists in Oregon worked diligently to exploit . . . doubts [about a reform measure] and derail the revision. Although they were unable to duplicate the backstage maneuvering that had proven so effective in 1995, church members did a masterful job of lobbying lawmakers and offering public testimony designed to undermine support for [a revision]. At one meeting of the state senate’s judiciary committee, no fewer than eight church members spoke, and all of them delivered the same message: in the interests of protecting religious liberty and acknowledging a proven form of treatment, legislators should retain the religious-healing exemption. One observer compared the intensity of the church’s grassroots efforts to the lobbying done by members of the National Rifle Association on behalf of gun owners.

For a time, it appeared that the church would once again stymie statutory reform aimed at stiffening penalties for parents who engaged in religion-based medical neglect of children. After [a revision] won passage in the state House of Representatives, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee restored most of the spiritual-healing defenses that the original version of the measure had eliminated. The move infuriated many of the bill’s supporters: one groused that restoring the defenses for religious healing “kind of guts the whole goal of the bill.” The Oregonian, which had played no small role in bringing the issue of religion-based medical neglect of children to the legislature’s attention, also weighed in, urging lawmakers to reject the “watered down” bill and instead enact a measure that would serve as “a deterrent to the reckless practice of faith that endangers children.”

And, finally, there is Colorado:

[In] 2001, lawmakers and children’s welfare advocates in Colorado hoped to achieve similar success in their own long-running battle against religion-based medical neglect. Events in that state followed a familiar and dispiriting pattern in which a series of highly publicized deaths of children in faith-healing churches highlighted the need for reform in statutes covering manslaughter and neglect. As had been its habit for a century, the Christian Science Church launched a well-orchestrated lobbying effort to head off any such changes, insisting to state lawmakers (and their constituents) that removing exemptions for religious healing would compromise the individual liberties of parents who relied on spiritual means to treat the illnesses of their children.

Colorado had been struggling with religious exemptions since at least 1989, when legislators attempted to strengthen state laws governing child abuse and neglect. At the behest of Christian Scientists, lawmakers inserted into the revised statutes a provision stating that religious-healing treatments determined to be valid by insurance companies and the Internal Revenue Service were to be considered among the legitimate forms of medical treatment mandated for sick or injured children. Although this stipulation was narrowly tailored to benefit Christian Scientists, it “had a chilling effect on prosecution” across a range of religious faiths, according to the head of the state’s district attorneys council. Indeed, as neglect-related deaths mounted in Colorado in the 1980s and 1990s among members of sects such as the Church of the First Born (which had been implicated in fatalities in Oregon as well), relatively few parents were held legally accountable. According to one tally, religion-based medical neglect claimed the lives of more than a dozen children in the state between 1974 and 2001, but in only three instances were parents convicted of any crime.

In 1993, state representative Doug Friednash resolved to close the statutory loophole and remove the state’s religious-healing exemption for child neglect. A former prosecutor who had taken a special interest in children’s welfare issues, Friednash had been prompted to act by the tragic neglect death of a young girl whose parents belonged to the Church of the First Born. Friednash’s bill sailed through a legislative committee, “but then the Christian Science onslaught began,” he later said, “and the bill was killed.” Friednash, outraged over the church’s maneuvering, offered a dire prediction about the impact of the bill’s failure. “At the time,” he said, “I warned that more children would die because of religious exemptions.”

[Two faith-healing deaths] prompted renewed calls for reform in the laws governing child abuse and neglect in Colorado. Daniels, who had pursued criminal charges in the former case but not in the latter, grumbled that “the current statutory scheme is seriously flawed and should be changed.” Daniels asserted that prosecutors would be able to file charges in more cases of religion-based medical neglect—and thereby deter parents from engaging in it—if legislators clarified the statutes and removed the exemption for religious healing. Russell George, the speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, echoed his point, stating plainly, “We need to change the statute.”

State lawmakers responded to such calls early in 2001 by taking up a bill designed to remove the religious-healing exemption that they had approved in 1989 at the behest of Christian Scientists. The proposal elicited impassioned oratory from both spiritual healers and their critics. Rita Swan, in characteristically stern testimony before a House subcommittee, criticized the exemption and scoffed at the notion that spiritual healing provided an adequate substitute for medical care. Bluntly questioning the core of spiritual healers’ beliefs, she said that their practices did not merit statutory protection because there was no credible evidence that prayer actually worked. “Colorado’s present law gives parents and church officials the impression that exclusive reliance on prayer is not only legal but safe,” Swan stated. “We do not think either the [Christian Science Church] or the Church of the First Born has credible evidence that they can heal serious diseases of children.”

Another story on the Wisconsin bill

The Journal Sentinel in Milwaukee also is covering the efforts of the Christian Science church to shape a revision of Wisconsin law governing child abuse and neglect. (I'm quoted in the middle of the piece, which is accessible here.)

On the surface, the revision sounds promising to those who want the state's faith-healing exemption repealed. The new measure apparently does so. But what I found most interesting in the piece is the following passage about the revised measure:

"It also would create an 'affirmative defense' for parents who provide a 'standard of reasonable care' for their child. . . Just what constitutes 'reasonable care' would be left to judges to determine, Peterson said."

As I said in the revised Capital Times article on the statutory revision, I think this ill-defined "reasonable care" loophole could be enormously problematic. In many faith healing death cases, parents seize on precisely this kind of claim when they attempt to escape criminal sanction for having failed to provide conventional medical treatment for their sick children.

Typically, the argument goes something like this: Yes, we realized that our daughter was sick, but we didn't think it was anything too dangerous. So -- reasonably -- we relied on the spiritual healing traditions of our religious faith, which we think have proven effective for hundreds of years. When her condition failed to improve, we attempted to provide medical care, but it was too late; she already was too far gone. (And there was really no guarantee that the medical treatment would have saved her, anyway.)

History shows that when faith healing parents face criminal prosecution for failing to provide medical treatment for their children, they will attempt to squeeze through any kind of legal loophole. Having studied this extensively, my sense is that a murky "reasonable care" exemption might prove to be just such a loophole.

As it stands, the proposed revision seems half right. Removing the outright faith healing exemption appears to be a positive step toward clarifying the law in this area, and it reflects clear public sentiment. However, the addition of a vague provision regarding "reasonable care" -- particularly one that does not explicitly define that "care" as prompt medical treatment -- seems likely to limit that progress toward clarifying the law.

Christian Scientists seeking to shape revision of Wisconsin law

The Capital Times in Madison is reporting that representatives of the Christian Science Church are working with state lawmakers to rewrite a portion of Wisconsin's child abuse and neglect law that deals with spiritual healing practices. (Shawn Doherty's article is available here.) The move is being made in response to the widespread public outcry against such practices that followed the death of Kara Neumann, the Weston, WI, youngster who died last Easter Sunday after being denied conventional medical treatment for diabetes.

To be candid, having studied numerous such efforts made over the years by the Christian Science Church, I'm not entirely convinced that a revision guided by the church will streamline criminal prosecutions of parents involved in these cases. Indeed, if history is any guide, a Christian Science-backed revision might only further complicate them.

I've yet to see the proposed bill, and I'm reluctant to offer extensive comment on it until I have done so. However, I've been told that the revised measure would still allow faith healers to offer some kind of "affirmative defense" related to their spiritual healing practices if they faced charges of child abuse and neglect. This could very well turn out to be another potential loophole for spiritual healers -- particularly if the statute fails to specifically articulate what such a defense might legally entail.