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When faith clashes with medical care

Rita Swan's 16-month-old son, Matthew, was dying of meningitis in the family's Michigan home in 1977. Swan never called a doctor.

Herbert Schaible (left) and Catherine Schiable
Herbert Schaible (left) and Catherine SchiableRead more

Rita Swan's 16-month-old son, Matthew, was dying of meningitis in the family's Michigan home in 1977. Swan never called a doctor.

Instead, as Matthew screamed in pain, Swan and her husband, then Christian Scientists, who eschew medical help, summoned church healers to pray over the boy. He was sick, they said, because the Swans lacked sufficient faith in God.

When nothing changed, maternal instinct overwhelmed piety, and Swan rushed Matthew to an emergency room.

By then beyond doctors' help, Matthew died of an illness that could have been vanquished by antibiotics. "Why did we let this happen to our baby?" asked Swan, who, like many parents faced with unthinkable agony, ultimately marshaled despair into a relentless energy for change.

"Since his death, we've worked to understand the pressures of religion on frightened parents. And we've dedicated our lives to enhancing children's rights to medical care."

Swan, now a nationally known advocate against religion-motivated withholding of medical treatment, founded the nonprofit Children's Health Care Is a Legal Duty (CHILD), in Kentucky. She speaks out on rare but troubling cases such as that of Herbert and Catherine Schaible, the Philadelphia parents who in 2009 followed the tenets of their religion and withheld medical care from their son Kent, 2, who died of bacterial pneumonia. The pair were sentenced to 10 years' probation.

Another son, Brandon, 8 months old, died after an illness April 18. The couple told police they knowingly violated their probation by not taking Brandon to a doctor. Prosecutors are awaiting autopsy results to guide them on any possible criminal charges.

The two cases have left observers aggrieved and puzzled over the powerful spiritual forces within a mother and father who choose not to help their sick children in the service of their God.

As for the Schaibles, their pastor, Nelson Clark, has suggested that a spiritual lack within the couple may have caused them to lose their children.

That sort of thinking is commonly a part of the faith-healing tradition, said Sarah Barringer Gordon, a professor of law and history at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in religion.

"There are many things people turn to: the power of prayer to work miracles and to cure illness," she said. "The idea that faith brings cure is not a new one, and doctors will often ask patients with serious illness if there's a spiritual tradition [to] which they can look for comfort."

In the Bible, Exodus 15:26 says, "I am the Lord that heals you."

The Book of James 5:14 says, "Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him . . ." James 5:15 goes on: "And the prayer of faith shall save the sick."

The Schaibles' First Century Gospel Church, founded in 1925, adheres to the notion of "divine healing," according to its website: It places "100% faith in God's power to miraculously heal any sickness or disease . . . without the application of medicines."

The notion of withholding medical care is connected to Christian traditions in which the religious handle poisonous snakes or take poison such as strychnine, according to Barringer Gordon.

If they don't die, they're seen as devout.

"For many, disease is a test of faith. By treating it with human medicine, you've failed the test," Barringer Gordon said.

When faith healers pray for a sick child who dies, "it means to them that God wants to take the child for his own," said E. Mark Stern, a psychologist in Upstate New York with an expertise in fundamentalist religion.

"It's a very, very primitive kind of thinking."

Stern said parents who eschew doctors in favor of prayer are typically insecure people willing to "sacrifice reason" to a charismatic pastor they consider to be a kind of "super-parent."

Church members, in fact, are "completely suggestible," acting as though hypnotized by church leaders who preach nonmedical intervention, Stern said.

"These parents stake their entire being on a cultish morality," he added. "They love their kids but are willing to give up what they cherish to this deity."

Cases such as the Schaibles' are extraordinarily rare, and most judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys go through entire careers without seeing their like, Swan said.

No official listing of child fatalities from religion-motivated nontreatment exists.

Swan's work for CHILD shows that about 30 children have died from such withholding of treatment in Pennsylvania in the last 100 years, including six in a single Philadelphia family in the 1970s and 1980s. Three have died in New Jersey - one in Mays Landing - since the early 20th century, CHILD records show.

Nearly all the families belonged to either First Century Gospel or its mother church, Faith Tabernacle Congregation of Hunterdon County, N.J., Swan said.

Just six criminal prosecutions stemmed from the deaths, CHILD records show, due in part to the knotty nature of religious cases, Swan said.

Also confounding some cases is an exemption to state child protective services law that says a death in an instance of religion-motivated nontreatment cannot be called child abuse.

While this does not mean that parents are immune from prosecution for letting their child die by withholding medical help, the exemption hinders the efforts of social workers, said Pennsylvania child advocate Cathleen Palm.

In the Kent Schaible case, Department of Human Services workers who visited the home after the 2-year-old's death had to close their investigation once the Schaibles told them they had withheld medical care for Kent because of religious beliefs.

The exemption is so confusing, however, some district attorneys erroneously believed it means they cannot prosecute parents who let their children die, Swan said. She wants to eliminate the exemption, which, beyond Pennsylvania, exists in 43 other states, including New Jersey.

Historians say the exemptions were lobbied into state laws in the 1930s by Christian Scientists. A spokesman for the church declined to comment.

Sometimes, doctors must go to court to treat a child whose parent refuses medical help on religious grounds.

Cindy Christian, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said that Jehovah's Witnesses, whose faith precludes blood transfusions, have been taken to court so doctors could operate on ailing children.

"We're respectful of families' wishes," Christian said. "But there are occasions when these wishes are dangerous and we intervene. Doctors are not in the habit of letting children die because of a parent's religious beliefs."