In Wisconsin, this week's trial over Kara Neumann's death marks a new battle over children's health care rights.
—By Deena GuzderLast Easter Sunday, 11-year-old Kara Neumann of Weston, Wisconsin, lay motionless on her bed, too weak to walk or speak. If her parents had called the hospital that day, Kara might have lived. Instead, Dale and Leilani—followers of the Unleavened Bread Ministry, an online church that shuns medical intervention—knelt in prayer beside her. Kara died a few hours later of diabetic ketoacidosis, a result of undiagnosed and untreated juvenile diabetes.
Are Dale and Leilani guilty of reckless endangerment? That's a question juries will start to answer this week as Leilani stands trial May 14. (Dale will be tried separately in June.) If convicted, each parent faces up to 25 years in prison. "The free exercise clause of the First Amendment protects religious belief, but not necessarily conduct," Judge Vincent Howard of Marathon County Circuit Court wrote when he ruled that the Neumanns must stand trial on charges brought by state attorney Jill Falstad. Howard has ordered all parties in the case not to speak to the media.
The highly anticipated trial has opened a new front in the long-running war between some religious communities and the medical establishment over children's health care. "We are not commanded in scripture to send people to the doctor," Unleavened Bread Ministries preacher David Eells said in a statement to his followers, "but to meet their needs through prayer and faith." Under current Wisconsin law, his followers aren't commanded by the state, either. Part of the legacy of the 1996 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which included a landmark exemption for parents who do not seek medical care for their children for religious purposes, is that parents cannot be accused of child abuse or negligent homicide if they genuinely believed that calling God, instead of a doctor, was the best option available.
While all states give social service authorities the right to intervene in cases of child neglect, criminal codes in more than half also provide additional protection for religious parents who forgo mainstream medical treatment. Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) and the Church of Christ, Scientist in Wisconsin are currently working on legislation that may further impact children's health care by creating an "affirmative defense" for religious parents who choose "faith healing" over mainstream medicine.
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