Responding to my previous post on religious exemption and medical neglect, Robot-heart-politics offers a persuasive response here. As usual, the whole post is worth reading, but I’ll truncate a bit for brevity’s sake. Robot Heart writes:
In the case of a child with a treatable illness (which is what we are talking about, by the way), whose alternative to treatment is certain death, I am very confident in the argument that parents should be required to seek appropriate treatment for their minor children.
I think there are many clear cases when the illness or injury is easily treatable, the death is certain, and the appropriate treatment is medically obvious. Now, most of the parents in these cases will explain that they do seek out the appropriate treatment. Specifically, they get a bunch of people around the child’s bed and pray frequently. Another might have decided to give the child some kind of hoaxy homeopathic remedy that is more religiously or culturally palatable. Another might try some kind of less proven therapy that is still medically sound. Another might have gotten different opinions about the certainty of death from a number of doctors and decided (optimistically) that the treatment isn’t terribly necessary. I don’t mean that there aren’t clear cases where we are quite comfortable giving court orders to give medical treatment to children over parent’s objections. But I think there are some gray areas.
If any parent can refuse treatment for their children on the basis of religious belief, what is to stop parents who do not or refuse to seek treatment for their children’s illness out of laziness, out of a desire to save money, out of neglect, from claiming that they refused treatment on the basis of religious belief if their child suffers serious harm as a result of their neglect?
The first amendment protects the free exercise of religion. We do not yet have a constitutional protection for laziness, neglect, or saving money. When the lazy parent shows up to court and says that they suddenly, secretly, and temporarily turned into a Christian Scientist, a judge is unlikely to believe them. But even if the judge does believe them, what’s the harm? Somebody doesn’t get prosecuted for something they should have been prosecuted for? We can’t undo the harm to the child—and when it comes to religious liberties or the efficacy of after-the-fact prosecutions, I’m much more worried about religious liberties.
In terms of consent, we already have legal age of consent in this country…. They are not old enough to make medical decisions for themselves, according to all the laws in this country at present…
Under the current laws, parents make medical and legal decisions for those under the age of consent. As they get closer to the age of consent, a court will be more and more likely to overrule the will of the parents in favor of the will of the child. And I think this is wholly appropriate in the case of a child seeking medical treatment. But what about the case where the teenage child and the parents agree that they don’t want to seek medical treatment. Should the government overrule both the family and the minor? Are we so confident in the moral rightness of extending the life of those who would prefer to risk death that we’re willing to throw out all principles of informed consent and force people to submit to unwanted medical treatment? In some cases, yes. If a three-year-old is bleeding to death, let’s get that child some actual medical attention. But how far are we willing to go? Would we force immunizations against non-lethal diseases? Would we force an unwanted cochlear implant on the deaf child of deaf parents? Would we force an invasive surgery that might allow somebody to walk?
