70 children dead from religious opposition to vaccination

As if the children of that country have't got enough problems, Pharyngula notes that a measles outbreak in Zimbabwe has killed at least seventy children over the last two weeks. The outbreaks are mainly in apostolic religious sects which combine Christian Fundamentalism with traditional African religious practices, with children being treated with holy water and prayer. They are strictly opposed to vaccination. But I suppose at least they can claim poor education, a country ravaged by poverty and corruption, and colonial religious indoctrination. Unlike other supernaturalists such as the adult model Jenny McCarthy, the actor Jim Carrey, or sundry Christian Science sects who hold similar beliefs with similarly tragic consequences.

More religious healing (child abuse) in Oregon

Viewing pictures of victims of acts of questionable morality (and even use of the word 'victim') increases the likelihood of making emotive rather than rational judgements of the culpability of the actors/perpetrators. However, an Oregonian op-ed, about an 8 month girl whose parents preferred Christ's healing power to that of doctors, shows the astonishing effects of faith in the form of a huge haemangioma that may cause the girl to lose sight in the affected eye (image from Clackamas County Sheriff's Office and linked from oregonlive.com).

Perhaps the only way such treatment could not be labelled child abuse is a distinction between acts and omissions. As Jonathan Glover (whose tidy desk policy speaks to his philosophical credentials) states:

...in certain contexts, failure to perform an act, with certain foreseen bad consequences of that failure, is morally less bad than to perform a different act which has the identical foreseen bad consequences. It is worse to kill someone than to let them die. (Glover, J. Causing Death and Saving Lives. 1977. Penguin. p.93).

The doctrine of distinction between acts and omissions is often invoked, for example, to explain why we are less morally culpable for the death of a child in Africa through failure to give to charity than we are for deliberately running over a child in our country. In such cases the remoteness of cause/effect is frequently invoked to explain our moral hunch that the latter is grossly more culpable than the former. However, if my child has crawled into the path of my car as I reverse, and I am fully aware of that, then I am no less liable for resultant injury than ifI intentionally place the child there just before backing the car out. There is no remoteness of cause and effect to invoke the acts/omissions distinction of crawling versus being placed there, just as no distinction can be made in the Oregon cases of blinding a child versus letting the child go blind through failure to seek medical help.

However, the courts in Orgeon continue to protect parents who, for faith reasons, do not seek medical treatment for their children. According to the state medical office, more than 20 childen of parents who belong to the same church as the girl pictured above have died of treatable illnesses. My suspicion is that the courts think little of leniency to those of faith (not unlike Cherie Blair showing clemency to a man who broke another's jaw in a fight, simply because he was a man of faith; AC Grayling's take on the matter here). Whilst it is always reprehensible for religious persons to be treated more leniently by the criminal justice system than the non-religious, it's particularly ironic to adopt such a position when faith itself is the cause of the criminality! Maybe photos such as that above can help combat such misplaced tolerance towards the results of 'faith', no matter how emotive they may be.

Faith healing and medical obligation

Because of their religious beliefs, Jeffrey and Marci Beagley of Oregon allowed their 16 year old son die rather than take him to a doctor. His urinary tract obstruction could have been treated easily, but instead he died an unfathomably painful death from heart failure secondary to kidney failure. In March 2010 his parents received 16 months in prison for negligent homicide.

According to The Oregonian, Neil Beagley was taken to the home of his grandmother, Norma Louise Beagley, where more than 60 Followers of Christ Church members held a faith-healing session that included anointing the boy with oil, 'laying on of hands' and praying for a cure (not best evidence treatments subjected to Cochrane review).

The Christian Science Church, who shun medical treatment due to their belief that disease is an illusion caused by sin, had successfully lobbied Oregon legislators to introduce a 'spiritual defense law' which protected parents who 'treated' their children with prayer rather than medicine from charges of first or second degree homicide. However, following a series of deaths, laws were passed in 1999 which required faith healing parents of ill children to seek medical help or risk prosecution.

A US-wide study estimated that 172 children died between 1975 and 1995 due to parental rejection of medical care on religious grounds, not including 78 deaths reported in Oregon from 1955-98 or 12 reported in Idaho from 1980-98 that were probably due to the faith healing practices of the Church of which the Beagleys were members (Seth Asser & Rita Swan, Child Fatalities From Religion-motivated Medical Neglect, 101 Pediatrics 625, 626-629, Apr. 1998).

One of the authors of this study, Rita Swan, writes in a courageous article in The Humanist:

My husband Douglas and I were devout, lifelong Christian Scientists until 1977 when we lost our only son Matthew as a result of our religious beliefs regarding medical care. It's hard for most people to understand this. It's hard for many to grasp how parents could watch a beloved child suffer, yet not call a doctor.

Now, faith-healing is clearly a belief which endangers a child (or adult, for that matter) when it comes to preventing and treating disease, and parents are thus rightly prosecuted for the deaths of their children (though, in many states, they cannot be prosecuted for neglect causing serious injury - there is a faith-based get-out clause due to successful lobbying by the Christian Science church).

Attempting to put aside the moral outrage engendered by parents letting their child's eye tumour become as large as his head, so that he could only get around by supporting his head on the walls (leaving bloody stains from tumour haemorrhage), let us consider a further matter: if people are culpable for injurious effects of their beliefs, then should they be held culpable for death or injury due to other, non-faith-based, beliefs?

The most interesting of these would be anti-vaccination beliefs (particularly anti-MMR, as espoused, for example, by the actor Jim Carrey) leading to measles outbreaks and child deaths. It is difficult to see how rejection of child vaccination differs from faith-healing in terms of parental culpability for injury or death of a child. A parent has a legal responsibility to look after their child's welfare. If they fail to do so, and a child dies or is injured because of it, it matters not whether the neglect resulted from beliefs that are based on 'religous faith'. Should similarly preposterous beliefs rejecting all available evidence for vaccine safety should also qualify?