Faith-healing panel wraps up hearing, path forward pondered…

The Idaho Legislature’s interim working group on faith healing and children at risk wrapped up its meeting after powerful testimony from an array of presenters today, from an Ada County prosecutor who told of children suffering needlessly and prosecutors unable to act, to a faith-healing proponent who shared his deeply held beliefs.

“It’s a heartfelt community, and that’s one of the issues, is how do we do these things and respect our communities?” said Sen. Dan Schmidt, D-Moscow, shortly after the hearing wrapped up with testimony from Followers of Christ member Dan Sevy. “The issue I have is that the law, even though we pause and try to write things perfectly, it’s still a blunt instrument,” said Schmidt, a physician. “How we treat each other, how we create respect for our fellow citizens should be the goal. The state, I think, clearly has an obligation to protect children. It’s just a question … of how to do that.”

He added, “What I want to happen is I want kids to be healthy. I agree with Mr. Sevy that there’s lots of ways to get there.”

Sen. Marv Hagedorn, R-Meridian, said, “This is a complex issue. I learned some things about statutes today that I was unaware of.” He said he needs more information about the extent of the problem. “I don’t know yet where we’re going to go with this,” he said.

The 10-member joint legislative panel was given a copy of a July 1, 2015 report to Gov. Butch Otter from the Governor’s Task Force on Children at Risk, in which task force Chair Kirtlan Naylor reported that the task force had concluded that Idaho should amend its religious exemptions “to exclude them from application where a child’s death or severe disability is imminent.”

“The Governor’s Task Force on Children at Risk has reviewed these matters and is concerned for the well-being and protection of Idaho’s children in circumstances where children have no voice in medical choice,” Naylor wrote. “Religious freedoms must be protected, but vulnerable children must also be appropriately sheltered from unnecessary harm and death.”

Naylor wrote that Idaho enacted religious defenses to criminal injury of children in 1972, including creating a religious defense to manslaughter. “Idaho parents with religious objections to medical care have the legal right to let their children die without medical care,” he wrote. “There is no record of any debate or discussion of these religious defenses. They were part of a larger bill that passed both chambers within four days after they were introduced in the final week of session.”

From 2002 to 2011, 3.37 percent of the deaths in Idaho were children, according to state vital statistics records, Naylor wrote. But in the Peaceful Valley Cemetery in Canyon County, where 130 people died and were buried during the same period, 40 were children or stillborns. “If children in this cemetery died at the same rate as Idaho children statewide, there would be only four child graves during that decade. However, based upon the apparent 40 child deaths in that cemetery, there is a child mortality rate of 31 percent, or about 10 times the Idaho pediatric population as a whole.”

That cemetery is where adherents of the Followers of Christ are buried.

Naylor wrote, “Our First Amendment right to religious freedom does not include the right to abuse or neglect children. In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, ‘The right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or child to communicable disease, or the latter to ill health or death. … Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children before they have reached the age of full and legal discretion when they can make that choice for themselves.’”

Naylor included the case citation, Prince v. Massachusetts 321 U.S. 158 (1944), and wrote, “Children need to be protected until they can make their own medical decisions.”

This month, another state group, the Idaho Child Fatality Review Team, published its third annual report, this one reviewing child deaths in 2013, and it found that five Idaho children died that year because their parents’ religious beliefs prevented them from seeking medical treatment. That brought the total over three years of reviews to 10 Idaho children, although the report noted that not all such deaths are reported.