State Legislatures magazine March 2000: Oregon Law Requiring Medical Care for Children Instead of Faith Healing

State Legislatures Magazine: March 2000

Editor's Note: This article appeared in the March 2000 issue of NCSL's magazine, State Legislatures. To order copies or to subscribe, contact the marketing department at (303) 364-7700.

When Faith-Healing Fails

Nationwide
Examining a Sect

When Faith-Healing Fails

The Oregon legislature has drawn a fine line between punishing devout parents and ensuring necessary medical care for youngsters.

By Dianna Gordon
Religious freedom vs. the state's role in ensuring citizens' health and well-being. It's a tough call, especially when the issue involves children.

It's an even tougher call when you're a freshman legislator and a conservative Christian who believes in the power of prayer.

That was what set the scene in Oregon during the 1999 session when first-term Representative Bruce Starr watched, with growing horror, news reports about a Christian fundamentalist cult in Oregon City that was using only the power of prayer to heal their children, sometimes with tragic results.

"I'm a conservative Christian. I believe God can heal, and I believe he does. But I have a stronger belief that parents' right to religion does not outweigh the rights of a child to life," Starr says. So the freshman legislator sponsored what was to become the hardest fought bill of the 1999 session-HB 2494, which stripped the shield of religious exemption from a parent's or custodian's duty to provide a sick or injured child with medical care.

The death of an 11-year-old from complications of diabetes is what set Starr on his course. "All he needed was a shot of insulin," Starr says. "There were 120 people in that house, praying for him. And all he needed was a shot."

The failure of the local district attorney to prosecute the crime was the impetus for legislative action. She had cited the state's religious immunity laws as the reason she did not file charges against the parents.

At that time, Oregon law stated that "charges of criminal mistreatment do not apply" to a person who provides a child "with spiritual treatment through prayer from a duly accredited practitioner of spiritual treatment ... in lieu of medical treatment."

The religious shield provided an absolute defense against charges of murder by abuse or neglect and manslaughter if parents or guardians were substituting prayer for medical treatment.

NATIONWIDE
Four states have no religious immunities in criminal and civil codes. In those areas, state courts have ruled that such immunity laws are unconstitutional because they violate the 14th Amendment, which offers all citizens equal opportunity under the law, according to Rita Swan, president of Children's Health Care Is a Legal Duty (CHILD). Five states-Arkansas, Ohio, Iowa, Delaware, West Virginia-have a religious defense for charges of homicide. Most of the other states include a religious defense for child death, neglect or abuse charges.

Most states that do have a religious exemption, however, also vest power in the court or the state to order medical treatment for a child if needed.

So the situation facing Oregon was not exactly unique when it came to the parents' right to practice their religion and the question of medical care for their children. In fact, a study that Swan co-authored with Dr. Seth Asser that appeared in the American Academy of Pediatrics journal, reported that of 172 child deaths studied between 1975 and 1995, 140 children would have had a 90 percent chance of survival with basic medical care; 18 had a 50 percent chance and all but three would have benefited from a physcian's care.

EXAMINING A SECT
The death of Bo Philips, the 11-year-old diabetic, almost immediately brought media scrutiny-including that of the Portland Oregonian newspaper, the local television station and the nationally aired 20/20 program-to the Followers of Christ, an Oregon City, Ore., congregation of approximately 1,200 that uses prayer in lieu of medical attention for sick children. The Philips boy's death was, according to the Oregon state medical examiner, the third in a year of a child in a community that believed in faith-healing.

With public scrutiny, records revealed that 78 children had died and had been buried in the Followers' cemetery since 1955. Dr. Larry Lewman, state medical examiner, reported his records indicated that as many as 25 of the children from the Follower's congregation had died in the past two decades because parents offered prayer instead of medical care.

When Starr introduced his bill, it originally allowed a murder prosecution against any parent who withheld medical care from a child who consequently died due to lack of that care.

"That generated quite a bit of controversy," Starr says. A major obstacle was the state's mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years in prison for a murder conviction. "A lot of my conservative friends supported the bill, but they didn't want to be responsible for putting loving, caring parents away for 25 years on a murder conviction."

A compromise was approved by a large majority in the House and in the Senate. Religious exemptions to second-degree manslaughter, criminal nonsupport, criminal mistreatment and neglect were repealed. The law also gave judges the right to disregard the mandatory minimum sentence of 75 to 300 months in jail and allowed them to impose a lesser amount of jail time in those cases where parents had genuinely believed that faith healing would save their child.

But what Starr says has given him the greatest satisfaction is that "the DA for Oregon City has been flooded with phone calls from members of the church asking what they need to do to stay within the bounds of this law.

"I had no desire to send parents to jail," he concluded, "I just wanted to see that kids get the medical care they need."

Dianna Gordon is an assistant editor of State Legislatures.

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