OVO

A hemophilic boy in Pennsylvania bleeds to death over a period of two days from a small cut on his foot. An Indiana girl dies after a malignant tumor sprouts from her skull and grows so enormous that it’s nearly the size of her head. A boy in Massachusetts succumbs to a bowel obstruction. (His cries of pain are so loud that neighbors are forced to shut their windows to block out the sound.) None of these children benefit from the readily-available medical treatments that might save their lives, or at least mitigate their suffering. Because the tenets of their parents’ religious faiths mandate it, their ailments are treated by prayer rather than medical science. The results are tragic.

It is difficult to determine precisely how many children in the United States lose their lives every year as the result of the phenomenon that has come to be known as religion-based medical neglect. A landmark study published in the journal Pediatrics uncovered more than 150 reported fatalities over a 10-year period – a tally that one of the study’s authors later said represented only “the tip of the iceberg” of a surprisingly pervasive problem. Assessing whether forms of religion-related child abuse pose a greater risk to children than more widely publicized threats, such as ritual satanic abuse, a wide-ranging study funded by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect concluded that “there are more children actually being abused in the name of God than in the name of Satan.”

Since the late nineteenth century, hundreds of such instances of abuse have resulted in tangled criminal litigation. The parents charged in these cases – many of them Christian Scientists or members of small Christian churches that ground their doctrines in narrowly literal interpretations of the Bible – often have argued that the First Amendment safeguards their decision to adhere to their faiths’ religious traditions and treat their ailing children solely by spiritual means. Prosecutors, meanwhile, have balked at the notion that constitutional protections for religious liberty provide an absolute bar to state regulation of religious conduct, particularly when that behavior puts the safety of children at risk. Their task often has been complicated, however, by murky state manslaughter and abuse statutes that appear to provide exemptions for religious healing practices.

[Article continues at link. Congratulations to the author for addressing this topic. I do have a few corrections and amplifications to make, though. I am in agreement that 150 child sacrifices (let's call it by it's proper name) is a low estimate, as I can identify eighty at a single Church. Christian Scientists and the like do not have a narrowly literal interpretation of the Bible; they have the Bible, and what the Bible says to do is exactly what they do. What separates these Churches from other Churches is that in this regard they are less secular and more religious, just as some Churches are more secular and less religious about homosexuality although the Bible clearly states that homosexuals are to be killed by Christian hands. Modern Christianity is largely secular and most Christians know how to be Christians on Sundays or holidays and physicists, educators, or just decent people the rest of the time. Islam has yet to catch the secular bug. State laws do not appear to provide exemptions for religious healing practices [ie child sacrifice to an invisible monster that lives in the sky], they do provide exemptions for religious healing practices. As strongly worded as this article is, it doesn’t deliver both barrels to a monster deserving to be put down forever. – Trevor Blake]