Expand the Federal Definition of Medical Neglect to Include Faith-Healing-Only Treatments for Children

Federal law exempts so-called faith-healing from the minimum federal definition of medical neglect under CAPTA, the Child Abuse and Prevention Treatment Act. Thus authorized by federal law, approximately thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia allow for some form of exemption in state statutes. In addition to elimination of the exemption at both the federal and state level, the Secular Coalition for America advocates for federal and state statutes that would specifically impose civil liabilities on “faith-healing” treatment providers. In addition, the Secular Coalition advocates that in order to be eligible to receive federal funds a state must treat parents who medically neglect their children for religious reasons exactly as they do all other parents who medically neglect their children.

The 2007 book, When Prayer Fails, by Shawn Francis Peters detailed the horrors resulting from so-called “faith-healing.”

• A two-year-old is left to slowly bleed to death from an easily treatable cut (p.3-5)

• A tumor growing from a four-year-old’s eye, eventually equaling the size of the child’s head causes the child to die. As the child walked through her home blood trails were left on the walls as her massive tumor scraped the walls. Later the child died. (p.16)

• A child’s tumor left untreated results in amputation, because the parent believes that the child was being punished for sin that must be cured through prayer. (p. 11)

• A two year old, with a treatable bowel obstruction, dies after vomiting fecal matter over the course of several agonizing days during which the child screamed repeatedly in tortured agony. (p.122-123)

• A twelve year old is neglected such that her treatable tumor grows to 41 inches in diameter. When the child is finally hospitalized, the staff and patients were overwhelmed with the smell of decaying flesh which permeated the entire floor of the hospital. Later the child died. (p.13)

• An eight year old girl is left in “excruciating pain” for two weeks from treatable meningitis; she eventually dies. (p.120)

It is unknown how many children are killed each year by “faith-healing.” A study of the Faith Assembly congregation children and infant mortality rates found that the mortality rate for Faith Assembly infants up to 28 days old was 270% higher than the national average.(1) We do know that many of these children are kept from social interactions, and, particularly with young children, many deaths are entirely uninvestigated and not included in any statistic.

A recent study by the National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect states stated that “more children are actually being abused in the name of God than in the name of Satan.” Secular Coalition for America believes science and compassion should be the decisive factor in children’s heath.

Politicians will sometimes try to justify these horrific legal exemptions by claiming these exemptions are a religious constitutional right. This is untrue. The Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that there is no right “to make martyr of their children. (2) The exemptions in federal and state law are merely the result of lobbying in which religious special rights are placed above basic ethics, humanity, and science.

Religious exemptions for faith-healing are opposed by the American Medical Association, The American Academy of Pediatrics, the National District Attorney’s Association, but the torture of children needs greater focus.

(1) Seth Asser and Rita Swan, "Child fatalities from religion-motivated medical neglect," Pediatrics 101(April 1998):625-9.

(2) Prince v. Massachusetts, U.S. Supreme Court, 1943