In case you’re not subscribed to the post from earlier this week,”Canadian government kills First Nations girl out of misguided respect for faith“, you may have missed today’s comment from momand2boys on her (I’m assuming “mom” = female) experiences as a young Jehovah’s Witness. I want to put this above the fold because it raises several imporant points. First, the comment:
I grew up a devout Jehovah’s Witness. Words cannot describe how truly religious I was. I would have fought tooth and nail against a blood transfusion for any reason from a very young age. Children of Jehovah’s Witnesses are often taken from their parents by court order for blood transfusions and my childhood was filled with stories of parents smuggling their babies out of hospitals against doctors orders. I had a friend who died in a car accident when I was 15 – she died because she didn’t have a blood transfusion. These people were applauded and the ones who did (even infants) were seen as martyrs. [JAC: see this page about their martyrdom.] We were taught from a very young age that if we were before a judge we were to say that taking a blood transfusion was akin to being raped and that we would fight it against all power. We carried cards to say no blood transfusion. It was a completely consuming part of our identity.
I mention this because at 14 or 11 or heck, even 7 I would have fought to the death to not have a blood transfusion. My eternal life depended on it. But, I never had a chance to think otherwise. I was completely indoctrinated at a young age. This is a long response to why you can’t just let a young person make this decision.
In general parents should have broad latitude when it comes to their child. But, what if I don’t want my child to ride in a car seat because it isn’t traditional and they don’t do it in some other countries? What if Jesus told me that car seats are bad? What should happen? The same standard should apply to medical care including vaccines, blood transfusions, and chemotherapy. A parent’s right to do what they want with their child should never trump the child’s right to life.
This is a frank and thoughtful comment, and I’m grateful for it.
One important issue here is whether a child’s wish for religiously-based or “alternative” treatment should be “respected” if the child’s life is in danger and if science-based medicine is a far better choice. In articles on the Web, I’ve seen several people argue that Makayla Sault, the First Nations child in Canada who just died from leukemia, should have had her own decision to discontinue chemotherapy respected and followed because, after all, she vehemently argued to discontinue chemotherapy. (In fact, nobody in the Canadian judiciary or government fought that decision, and they were remiss in their laxity.) But the whole point of those child-protection laws against faith healing that do exist in the U.S. is that children lack the maturity and understanding to make such decisions. The comment above drives that point home.
Children of medicine-rejecting faiths like Christian Science and the Jehovah’s Witnesses are often heavily indoctrinated in the faith, and adamantly refuse transfusions or regular medical care. But do they have the experience and knowledge to make such decisions? My response is “hell no!” Of course if we’re to allow adults to make their own medical-care decisions, then there must be a more or less arbitrary cut-off age. But that age is not 11. For children below the cut-off age, the parent’s and children’s wishes should not matter when it’s a life-or-death issue and when death or permanent damage will ensue if science-based medicine is rejected in favor of faith-based treatments. The state must intervene.
But of course who are the parents who reject modern medical treatment? They are simply the grown-up children that remain indoctrinated. So why punish them? (This is just one instance of someone not having free will about what they do—which is of course the case for everyone.)
We should punish them for the same reasons we punish anyone who hurts other people deliberately or through neglect: to deter others from doing the same thing (an environmental influence that can feed into the brain’s decision program); to “fix” them if their bad behavior can be remedied through other interventions in prison or in hospital; and to keep them away from society (in the case of a parent who refuses to give medical care to their children, you take away the kids as well).
If you read about these cases in the U.S. you’ll be horrified at how lightly the parents get off. The Christian Science parents of Ashley King, a girl in Arizona who died—horribly—from bone cancer when her parents refused to take her to a doctor (she had over a 50% chance of cure), were given only probation without supervision. In other words, they weren’t punished at all. Ashley’s mother further claimed that she had done nothing wrong—that she was a “good mother.” That’s hogwash. But that’s also faith.
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Finally, you may have heard about the measles outbreak caused by a failure to vaccinate children, many of whom got infected at Disneyland in California. Such vaccinations should be mandatory for all kids who don’t have medical exemptions (i.e., a weakened immune system), and there should be no exemptions based on religion. After all, unvaccinated children endanger not only themselves, but other children as well.
But there’s little chance that such exemptions will be eliminated. The New York Times, in an article about the mini-epidemic of measles, includes this bit at the end (my emphasis):
The battle [about vaccination regulations] has moved to state legislatures, where lawmakers have sought to make it easier for parents to obtain exemptions from vaccination requirements. However, all 31 bills introduced from 2009 to 2012 that would have loosened the exemption process were defeated, said Saad B. Omer, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Emory University who studies vaccine refusal. Three out of five bills that sought to tighten the requirement passed, he said.
California tightened its “personal belief” exemption law last year, requiring parents to submit a form signed by a health care provider. But Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, added a religious exemption at the last minute; parents who choose that option do not need a doctor’s signature.
The first paragraph is great; the second not so much. And remember that there are still religious exemption laws in many of those states, so we’re just talking about “loosening” them, probably to include reasons other than religion as valid to get an exemption. As for Jerry Brown, his decision was execrable. And I thought he was an atheist. . .
