Religious exemptions from medical care: Faith healing kills children.

If your faith mandates spiritual healing and your child dies because you offer prayer instead of insulin or antibiotics, your chances of being charged with a crime are slim. There are religious exemptions for child neglect and abuse, negligent homicide, involuntary manslaughter. Several states allow parents to use a religious defense against charges of murder of their child—and in some places they can’t be charged with murder at all. And even when parents are prosecuted, acquiescence to religious belief often leads to their being acquitted or given light sentences, including unsupervised parole. None of this, of course, applies to parents who refuse medical care on nonreligious grounds; those individuals get no immunity from prosecution.

Some states allow religious exemptions from required testing of newborns for metabolic disorders, such as the inability to break down fats or amino acids, that can kill an untreated child but are perfectly treatable if caught early. Some states allow exemptions from giving newborns hearing tests or prophylactic eyedrops that can prevent blindness in infants infected with chlamydia or gonorrhea.* Seven states allow religious exemptions from testing children for lead levels in their blood, and six even allow religious exemptions to students learning about disease in school. In perhaps the most bizarre and potentially dangerous law, public school teachers in California can legally refuse to be tested for tuberculosis on religious grounds.

These exemptions have produced the expected result: Hundreds of children have gotten sick and died because their parents resorted to faith rather than medicine. I cover this ongoing tragedy, one of the most serious conflicts between rationality and superstition, in my new book, Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, and you can read more in Caroline Fraser’s God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church and Paul Offit’s Bad Faith. These children either have no choice in their treatment or are not mature enough to make informed decisions. Some, like children of Jehovah’s Witnesses who die from refusing blood transfusions, are even extolled as “Youths who put God first.” All of them are martyrs to their parents’ religion.

Religious exemptions from medical care: Faith healing kills children.