At the Heart of the Faith Healing Debate

Two Oregon parents were recently charged with criminally negligent homicide because they stood praying as their 16-year-old son died from a prolonged and curable illness. Their 15-month-old niece also died earlier this year from a treatable infection.

Oregon lawmakers must consider ways to protect the health of minors while honoring their right to religious devotion and practice -- even if that practice leads them to an untimely death.

Oregon law provides for minors 15 or older to seek medical care independent of their parents' consent. I discovered this for myself several years ago when I took my 16-year-old son to a local emergency room for a drug test and was turned away because he declined to be tested. So it's clear that the right to choose to receive medical treatment includes, inherently, the right not to receive treatment.

What's at stake here is a minor's ability to make an informed choice -- regarding medical treatment and religion.

First, regarding medical consent, the central concern in the most recent case is whether the 16-year-old understood that his illness, a urinary tract blockage, which ultimately led to kidney and heart failure, was life threatening and treatable.

If the family of a minor who is 15 or older believes in faith healing, they should be required by law to ensure that their child has been informed of his or her options by a medical professional. If the minor subsequently chooses faith healing, the parents should be absolved of criminal responsibility in the event of their child's death.

Second, regarding religious identification, the essential issue is that children acquire their religious beliefs from their parents. Believing parents who purport to have access to God through faith are likely to resist introducing their children to secular options that they not only consider to be false, but also evil. By the age of 15, minors would be in a better position to claim and verify their own religious identity.

The state of Oregon has a responsibility, to the extent that it's possible, to mandate that the minor children of those who believe in faith healing, at least those who are at least 15 years, are informed of medical options and can claim religious identity before choosing faith as their healing process.

Conversely, Oregon's faith-healing parents must be prepared to face stiffer penalties should they choose to deny access to life-saving information and medical intervention. The current average sentence is not stringent enough to deter their faith-bound determination.

The irony is that these are the same faithful who are vigilantly "pro life"; the reality is that two children from the same family are dead.

If there is one thing that Oregonians have historically defended, it's a person's right to choose. That question of choice -- informed choice -- should be at the heart of the faith-healing debate.

Of course, that debate becomes academic -- even bizarre -- with regard to the 15-month-old girl. Absent the child's capacity to choose, medical intervention must be mandated.

Lori-Ann Stephensen of Lake Oswego is a graduate student at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

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