Children Are Suffering as Faith Healers Hide Behind Religious-Exemption Shield

It has been four years since 4-year-old Shauntay Walker of Sacramento succumbed to bacterial meningitis after a 17-day ordeal during which her only treatment consisted of bedside prayer by a religious healer.

Now the California Supreme Court will decide whether her mother is subject to prosecution for manslaughter and felony child endangerment or, as Laurie Walker’s lawyers contend, whether she is protected by a provision in the California Penal Code that exempts from the definition of child neglect “treatment by spiritual means through prayer alone in accordance with the tenets and practices of a recognized church or religious denomination by a duly accredited practitioner thereof.”

Sporadically, over the past few years, the media have reported tragic cases similar to Shauntay’s in which young children with curable life-threatening conditions like bacterial pneumonia, meningitis or intestinal obstruction died after decisions by parents to substitute spiritual for medical treatment.

This religious-exemption clause in California’s child-abuse and neglect-reporting law was incorporated into the laws of all 50 states during the mid-1970s as a condition of eligibility for protective-services grants under the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974. Although the federal law has been amended to eliminate this statutory requirement as a condition of federal funding, California remains one of 43 states to retain this confusing, unfair and harmful exemption in its child-abuse and neglect-reporting law and in recently amended juvenile-dependency provisions of the Welfare and Institutions Code.

The inherently confusing nature of the religious exemption is highlighted by the current legal controversy over Walker’s culpability. California’s child-abuse reporting law says that a child “receiving treatment by spiritual means . . . by a duly accredited practitioner” or “not receiving specified medical treatment for religious reasons . . . shall not for that reason alone be considered a neglected child.” This vague language leaves unclear whether those responsible for choosing spiritual over medical treatment may be held legally responsible if harm comes to a child under such circumstances.

The recently enacted child-dependency legislation does permit the juvenile court to assume the jurisdiction of a child under “spiritual treatment through prayer alone” if it is “necessary to protect the minor from suffering serious physical harm of illness.” But these supposed safeguards are undermined by the ambiguities, vagueness and contradictions in the reporting requirements that in effect exempt faith healers from the provision that requires reporting of medical neglect by all “health practitioners,” which includes by definition “a religious practitioner who diagnoses, examines or treats children.”

Furthermore, the religious-exemption clause unfairly provides parents belonging to a “recognized” religion with immunity from prosecution for medical neglect--a status clearly denied to the larger number of negligent parents whose spiritual credentials are unrecognized, or whose denial of medical care to their children is not supported by any religious philosophy. Although the primary purpose of child-abuse reporting laws is to protect children, not to punish parents, the religious exemption, to the extent that it excuses a class of parents from legal accountability for an otherwise prosecutable offense, puts children of such parents at increased risk.

The American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Bioethics recently argued against the religious-exemption clause, noting that it may protect “severe (even fatal) physical discipline, failure to seek needed medical care, or refusal of a proven efficacious treatment of a critically ill child.”

In its published statement the committee added: “The opportunity to grow and develop safe from physical harm with the protection of our society is a fundamental right of every child. No statute should exist that permits or implies that denial of medical care necessary to prevent death or serious impairment to children can be supported on religious grounds.”

The constitutionally protected freedom of religion should not permit children to be endangered by the religious practices of adults.

One can acknowledge the constructive role that religion may play in the lives of families and still agree that the religious exemption is bad law. No attempt to amend or modify it is likely to make it less confusing, unfair or harmful. Nothing short of total expungement of this clause, which permits harm to children under the shield of religious exemption, will do.