Posted on 03/28/2008 7:02:44 AM PDT by paleorite
Feelings about Nancy Grace aside, this story of how an 11-year-old Wisconsin girl slipped into a diabetic coma and died because her parents sat around praying rather than seeking medical attention for her--as relatives had been begging them to do for weeks--is horrifying. Though the parents insist they don't regard themselves as religious, they also note that laying on of hands is their preferred method of healing in general.
With apologies to similar believers everywhere, my first reaction to this is, Wow, these people are some kind of crazy. My second reaction: time to consider a little court-negotiated sterilization.
Seriously. This is America, so people should be allowed to be as religiously crazy as they wanna be--until their beliefs begin endangering other folks, most definitely including their young children. At that point, since you can't practically compel people to give up their beliefs, you need to start thinking about limiting the number of other people they can harm. In this case, that means limiting the number of children these faith-healers can control.
At this point, criminal charges have yet to be filed. But assuming they do, and that jail time becomes a possibility, my argument would be to put sterilization on the table as an alternative. These people clearly didn't go into this with the intent to harm their child. But it's also clear that neither member of this couple is to be trusted with offspring. Ever. And unless they wind up locked up forever--which seems unlikely--you can't trust them not to do something irrational--and lethal--again.
Yeah, I know sterilization carries ugly baggage. But my argument for semi-voluntary snip snip snipping is similar to the one I made (lost somewhere in the archives) back during the saga of Andrea Yates, the post-partum-psychotic mom who brutally drowned her five kids in the bathtub. Since Yates was clearly insane, I could see not sending her to prison forever. But authorities also needed to make damn sure she could never have another kid. Thus the choice: incarceration or sterilization. (As things turned out, of course, Yates' murder conviction was overturned and she wound up in a low-security mental health facility. We can only hope no one is stupid enough to set her free until her child-bearing years are behind her.)
In no way am I suggesting this Wisconsin couple is psychotic. Nonetheless, if early reports are even close to accurate, Mom and Dad just let their child waste away for a month and die--from an easily treatable ailemnt--in the name of faith. (Shouldn't the coma have been a tip off that the prayer-only course of treatment needed some sort of supplement?) So we can argue about religious rights and parental rights and reproductive rights from now until Jesus returns. But, I'm sorry, these people should not be allowed to procreate again.
Who cares about sterilization? Send the parents to prison.
Same thing happened to a poor kid in Indiana about 20 years ago when I lived there. The parents were brought up on charges of child abuse, but were aquited. There was a lot of controversy about their even being brought up on charges. One thing I remember about that case is the father of the dead kid wore eyeglasses. So it was OK to have modern medicine fix his defect, but it was not OK for modern medicine fix his kids defect.
I think they should be put in prison for causing the death of a minor that they should have been protecting instead of killing. Of course we have the people on this website that oppose all vaccinations. The number of deaths from childhood diseases has increased since that has become popular. What is the difference between the two.
No zealotry on you, eh?
I strongly suspect that the crowd expressing outrage over this is the same one that was completely supportive of the death by dehydration of Terri Schiavo.
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Bingo!
“I strongly suspect that the crowd expressing outrage over this is the same one that was completely supportive of the death by dehydration of Terri Schiavo.”
I think you’re wrong. Everyone who is outraged by women who kill their children by abortion has to be outraged by this.
Terry Schiavo was a much more difficult case. She was being kept alive artificially. This was a pretty healthy kid here, from what the story says.
—I strongly suspect that the crowd expressing outrage over this is the same one that was completely supportive of the death by dehydration of Terri Schiavo.—
Cottle is a liberal, there’s no doubt, so I’m pretty sure she did approve of Schiavo’s death. A couple of comments about Schiavo:
1. Shame on Bill Frist for insisting that Schiavo was merely in need of therapy, when, in fact, her brain was pretty much gone. She had a lot of people (including me) hoping for a rescue, when, in fact, a rescue would have made her no better than she was pre-mortem.
2. Laws that make a spouse automatically next-of-kin EVEN WHEN THE PARENTS ARE STILL ALIVE AND WELL should be revoked. Marital relations are tenuous, and spouses often have nefarious intent towards each other (AFAIK Terri’s husband is in the same class as OJ, Robert Blake and Claus von Bulow) but parents almost never have nefarious intent towards their adult children. Thus, parents should remain primary next of kin for their adult children, *married or not*, unless said adult child insists otherwise. Before either one of my children marry, my wife and I will have them sign papers us their next of kin (over their husband) in case (heaven forbid) they are incapacitated.
—No zealotry on you, eh?—
It’s Cottle’s opinion, not necessarily mine.
I bet the author does not support sterilization for the homeless, for those who have on either side of teen pregnancy, those who do drugs while pregnant, etc. Only for the religious!
Yes, I know that wasn’t you, paleorite. Next time I’ll add attribution, since it can lead to confusion for freepers who only read the comments.
Terri Schiavo was not being kept alive artificially. Food went into her stomach by a different means. People with colostomies, food leaves by a different means. You wouldn’t say they aren’t entitled to live, would you?
Bears repeating. Terri Schiavo was not being kept alive artificially. On the contrary, it took extraordinary, spectacularly extraordinary means to kill her.
We should charge these parents...and we should also charge all the parents whose children died from mistakes in hospitals. Maybe they should have prayed instead.
Murder with premeditation.
NO SHE WASN'T. Terri required food and water to stay alive, if that is "being kept alive artificially," then so are you and I.
The same liberals who think 14 year olds are capable of controlling (aborting) their fertility see something wrong with the recommendation that those with popping out kids on welfare be sterilized, since they’ve proven they can neither support themselves or their kids.
Ok, this is really sad; but let’s think a moment before we start calling it criminal. Many people, with good reason, distrust conventional medical treatment. By the most conservative estimates about 200,000 people die each year because of medical errors. (source: Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in October of 2003.) Others (Ralph Nader) have placed the number as high as 500,000.
These people did something most of us think is terribly stupid, but we’re assuming that all would be well if they acted differently. Not only do we not know that for certain, but we also don’t know if this child would’ve become one of the 200,000 medical errors. To some it may seem “criminal” to submit your child to the care of a system that kills a quarter of a million people a year with their “expertise.”
These parents, however misguided, were not acting maliciously. To take the position that the “State” has the power to compel medical treatment is a clear step toward totalitarianism. This is exactly the kind of hysteria that has lead to laws allowing infants to be torn from there mothers arms and injected with vaccines containing potentially lethal viruses; or schools that demand students not return until adequately sedated with Ritalin.
Freedom and Individual liberty don’t always have a happy ending. Let’s not throw them away because one couple’s free choice ended with tragic results.
Some years before Terri was killed she had a urinary tract infection, her estranged, adulterous "husband" refused to allow her to be given routine antibiotics because he hoped the infection would spread and kill her. When this didn't happen, he asked, "when is this bitch going to die?"
I think the truth of the matter is that God does heal, and scripture does set out the method of anointing with oil and the laying on of hands by Christ-honoring elders of the Christian fellowship.
The problem is that real hard core faith is not what it was back during the days of the early church. The church has been polluted and infiltrated by the same filthy practices and pastimes that the world enjoys, and many of the “elders and deacons” of the modern churches can hardly be expected to function with anointing and laying on of hands for healing as most of them also are in many cases into multiple marriages and other questionable passtimes (and thus outside the scriptural standard for deacons and elders) - even given the extreme unlikelihood that a given church even practices anointing and laying on of hands.
In other words, faith has fizzled a lot in the hot light of the centuries passing with the accompanying degradation of Christian practices and standards since Christ.
and who, Ms. Cottle, gets to decide where that line gets drawn?
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