By Jennifer Popik, JD, Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics
Last week, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the homicide convictions of a couple who prayed over their gravely ill daughter rather than seek medical help. The 11 year old, Kara Neumann, had died in 2008 from complications related to untreated juvenile diabetes. Court records showed that the couple identify as Pentecostals.
The Neumanns contended that their criminal convictions were invalid because the state’s child neglect law allows parents to pursue “treatment through prayer.” The court ruled that provision irrelevant, however, to conviction under the reckless homicide law, which contains no such exception.
As the Wisconsin decision shows, when parents deny their child life-saving medical treatment based on a religious viewpoint, sympathy for their position is quite low. On the other hand, when parents agree to deny life-saving medical treatment to a child with disabilities, that decision is far less likely to be condemned.
Recent medical literature shows that parents of children with disabilities, heavily influenced by medical personnel, sometimes deny them life-preserving treatment that they would consider appropriate for a non-disabled child– even nutrition, hydration, and basic antibiotics.
So, what is going on here? Do parents have the right to make these kinds of life and death decisions for their children?
The 1980s saw high-profile cases of denial of lifesaving medical treatment to children born with disabilities. The two that garnered the most attention were the Bloomington, Indiana, “Infant Doe” case—an infant with Down syndrome who was starved and dehydrated to death—and the Long Island, New York, “Baby Jane Doe” case—an infant with spina bifida who, despite initial denial of treatment, survived.
Regulations based on federal law prohibiting discrimination based on disability were struck down by the Supreme Court in Bowen v. American Hospital Association, 476 U.S. 610 (U.S. 1986). Its reasoning was that doctors provide treatment to children only with parental consent, and the children were therefore being denied lifesaving treatment not based on their disabilities but based on parental decisions to withhold consent.
The majority was not persuaded by Justice White’s dissent, who said there was discrimination based on disability because health care facilities routinely contact child protection authorities when parents refuse consent to treatment necessary to save their children’s lives except when the child has disabilities.
Lawmakers, and the population at large often seem to think that it is reasonable to withhold treatment from a disabled child when based on a physician’s quality of life judgments, but unreasonable to withhold treatment based on religious opinion.
National Right to Life has long respected parental rights, for example supporting parental involvement legislation in the context of abortion. Parental rights are not absolute, however. The right of children, all children, to live must be paramount.
Accordingly, we have long advocated injunctive relief to prevent denial of treatment necessary to preserve a child’s life whether the denial of treatment is based on a religious belief, or a quality of life ethic.