Here at Citizen Wausau, we didn’t talk about the Neumann case. Maybe we weren’t interested enough; maybe we didn’t want to touch it with a ten-foot pole.
I’m nudging it a bit.
To tell you the truth, I was surprised by the verdict of guilty. I thought she would be acquitted.
To tell you the truth again, I thought a charge of child neglect was more reasonable.
This is an unpopular standpoint. Outrage is an understatement in regards to the response of our community to the tragic death of that dear girl. We pointed fingers and screamed that any responsible parent would have rushed their child to the hospital at the first of those symptoms. Kara was dead, but we could provide her justice.
I think it’s a complicated issue. This involves the rights of children who live in unconventional households. Bear with me on this while I try to explain. I’m going to go on a few tangents that barely relate, but I think they all share a common theme… interference and the right or duty to interfere.
Do we step in when whole families are living together in communes? Do we make sure the kids are getting proper medical attention? When cults are sequestered, do we storm the walls and take the children out of there because the parents aren’t providing their kids with a reasonable upbringing? Not often. Remember with that polygamy group down south, when the kids were all pulled out because they were living in an unnatural environment, and the girls were marrying too young? Didn’t we end up returning most of those kids back to their families after all? Why?
One of the shrill voices I hear in the anti-gay community says that gay people shouldn’t be parents. The couples shouldn’t be able to adopt, and if, God forbid, they manage to welcome a biological child into their home, the other parent shouldn’t be allowed to adopt their partner’s child. The Defense of Marriage people say that the heterosexual marriage is the best environment for families. They either state or imply that any other environment would be harming the children involved. These are children in unconventional households, and most of us don’t lose sleep worrying about the children involved.
But the Neumann case isn’t so grey. A child actually died as the result of the parents’ faith and their programmed responses to illness based on that faith. We can’t say… oh, what’s the harm? Let them be. We can’t, because someone died.
In the news now is the case of the teenage boy who refused chemotherapy. He has been court-ordered to undergo chemo. He and his mother went into hiding for a while to avoid the treatment. For a while there, it was a fuzzy issue because one parent wanted the treatment for their son while the other didn’t.
But here’s where my heart steps in. Every day we encourage people to sign for power of attorneys and fill out their DNR paperwork. We decide if we want medical intervention beyond a certain point, or if we want to die naturally. Some people just don’t want to be in a vegetative state for years; others don’t want any resusitation after a death, even though our medical knowledge is so advanced that we can bring people back from death sometimes with various means. We allow people to make those decisions, and the staff honors those decisions.
When a little boy I know was suffering from brain cancer, there came a point when they stopped trying to kill the cancer because the treatment was too harsh and the likelihood of success was too slim. Chemo hurts. It’s a terrible thing to have to go through, but most do, because life is what we all want. He died a natural death of cancer.
Without our medical interventions, people would be dying every day from influenza, asthma, cancer, diabetes, and a whole list of other ailments that are mostly treatable nowadays. When did that treatment become obligatory?
Still, Kara was a minor. She couldn’t chose. We can’t go back and take her aside and ask her what she wanted and assign a new guardian. Maybe she would have sided with her parents. I was raised with a Pentecostal mother who believed in faith healing. I believed in it too, because that’s what I was taught to believe. Parents raise children … governments don’t. Every day there are families who create their own dynamic of rules and values and guidelines, and we don’t interfere.
We wait until it’s too late… until someone dies as a result. Then we care. When everything is going fine, when one of the kids doesn’t have an illness they could die from, we stand aside and laud our civil rights and the rights of those families to live as they wish. We draw the line in the sand after the fact.
I say that if we are going to prosecute these parents for letting their daughter die of diabetes, we need to start stepping in at birth. All parents should be obligated to provide regular medical care for their children, and we should have a new bureaucracy to keep track of that care to make sure children don’t die of treatable diseases. Does that sound fair to you? Is that what you want?
What is the solution to this?
windowormirror
12:29 pm on June 1st
My thoughts would best be summed up by, “If you think the government is the answer, you bloody well don’t understand the question”.
I am strongly dedicated to the idea of personal freedom, and just as strongly to the idea of accountability. Since we prove on a daily basis that there are many who – regardless being ‘held accountable’ – will act irresponsibly, what are we to do?
We were the first nation on this planet that decided that ‘rights’ began with God, were given to ALL individuals and then the individual would cede power (or not) to the government. Of course, we’ve spent the next 225 years tearing down the idea that there is a God, or a set of ‘right behavior’ above and beyond what we decide for ourselves.
Setting aside the outrageous idea that there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ behaviors, there certainly are ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ behaviors (NOT to be confused with ‘right and wrong’ as the two are less and less frequently linked). The issue in this case was that no one has defined what rights the minor child has… no one has taken the time to outline these rights. We parrot Jefferson’s line, “One man’s right to swing his fist ends where the other man’s nose begins”, and then forget to outline where the fist ends and the nose begins. What do children have a right to? How far do those rights go? You can tell me that I don’t have the right to kill my child, but if you step in and tell me how to parent, you’ve got more trouble on your hands than you’d like, I guarantee it.
What’s the solution? More government? Again, never the answer.
John H. Fischer
6:44 am on June 2nd
there is a valid question of where you draw the line.
I am not a big fan of Dr’s.. never have been… never will be. I saw a Dr a few years ago when I messed up my knee… before that it had been well over a decade.
I do not really believe in any organized religion… and I really don’t believe in God or a God in the traditional Judeao-Christian sense of the term. However, I was raised Roman-Catholic and I was a Catholic as George Carlin would say “until the age of reason.”
I believe that people should have the freedom to make their own decisions about their lives… however until people have reached the age where they can understand these decisions (which I would place at 12 to 16 for most), the state has at least a minimual duty to ensure that they have thier most basic right – the right to live.
I have two very different thoughts on the two cases on the news lately. In the Neumann case, I agree with the decision of the state to prosecute, that they failed in their role of a parent to protect their child. However, in the MN cancer case, I am more on the side of the family.
Why the difference in my opinion? Based on the actual medical condition. Here, we are talking about something that is pretty easily diagnosed, and pretty easily treated with a very very high likelihood of success.
In MN, cures for many type of cancer are hit and miss as best… and it is hard to deny that sometimes the effects of the cure are actually worse than the disease itself.
Diabetes, although not curable, is fairly easily diagnosed, treated, and managed. I have seen no emperical evidence that faith-based healing has any effect, let alone a better effect.
On the other hand, with cancer treatment, I have seen emperical evidence that faith-based healing can have some effect. That having a positive outlook, that believing that you will get better… it does help in some cases. And there is evidence that people can undergo the treatment, often worse that the disease itself, and not get any better.. its a crap shoot at best.
I believe that in both cases, when the parents noticed that there is a problem, they had the obligation to determine what the problem was. And then how to address the problem (faith healing, non-traditional medicine, “western” mediceine, or a combination thereof) gets determined.
matthew
3:55 pm on June 2nd
Dr -
While you seem to be right on a lot of things you miss the boat on the MN case. The kid is suffering from Hodgkins Lymphoma, I think that’s what it is, but I know this is accurate. The type of cancer the kid has is between 85% and 90% curable with conventional chemo therapy. I would like to see the empirical evidence that prayer and faith healing work. That was a popular idea about five to ten years ago. So popular in fact that the Harvard University Medical School and the New England Journal of Medicine cooperated on a massive study into it. The result was that there really was no convincing evidence that prayer and faith healing worked. But your notion that chemotherapy and faith healing are both a “crap shoot” doesn’t apply in either case. Diabetes is treatable, no one disagrees with that. The type of cancer in the MN case, while not 100% curable, is highly curable with standard chemotherapy. Nowhere close to a “crap shoot”. To characterize it as such is simply not accurate. The same criteria that you use to suggest the guilt of the Neumanns apply to the MN case. In both cases the parents are guilty of neglecting ordinary treatments that are highly succesful. It is not a crapshoot in either of these cases.
Lisa Shilts
6:56 pm on June 2nd
My good friend Jane brings up the following point (and she has a daughter diagnosed with diabetes around age 11): if the Neumann’s were in a serious car accident and their daughter had serious injuries, and they refused to take her for medical care, and took her home and prayed for her, and she died, YOU KNOW they would be prosecuted. What is the difference?
Unfortunately, as we see way too often, many children need to be protected from their parents.
robertdebruce
8:37 am on June 8th
I do not think it is merely child abuse, nor is like watching someone in a car accident die. It is worse – it is more like causing the accident and then watching the person die. The girl had only one chance to live: to survive with a lack of insulin. The very real possibility exists that they simply did not want a daughter, unblessed by God in this manner, and she could either get over it or die.