When Faith-Healing Fails.

• Author: Gordon, Dianna

The Oregon legislature has drawn a fine line between punishing devout parents and ensuring necessary medical care for youngsters.

Religious freedom vs. the state's role in ensuring citizens' health and well-being. It's a tough call, especially when the issue involves children.

It's an even tougher call when you're a freshman legislator and a conservative Christian who believes in the power of prayer.

That was what set the scene in Oregon during the 1999 session when first-term Representative Bruce Starr watched, with growing horror, news reports about a Christian fundamentalist cult in Oregon City that was using only the power of prayer to heal their children, sometimes with tragic results.

"I'm a conservative Christian. I believe God can heal, and I believe he does. But I have a stronger belief that parents' right to religion does not outweigh the rights of a child to life," Starr says. So the freshman legislator sponsored what was to become the hardest fought bill of the 1999 session--HB 2494, which stripped the shield of religious exemption from a parent's or custodian's duty to provide a sick or injured child with medical care.

The death of an 11-year-old from complications of diabetes is what set Starr on his course. "All he needed was a shot of insulin," Starr says. "There were 120 people in that house, praying for him. And all he needed was a shot."

The failure of the local district attorney to prosecute the crime was the impetus for legislative action. She had cited the state's religious immunity laws as the reason she did not file charges against the parents.

At that time, Oregon law stated that "charges of criminal mistreatment do not apply" to a person who provides a child "with spiritual treatment through prayer from a duly accredited practitioner of spiritual treatment ... in lieu of medical treatment."

The religious shield provided an absolute defense against charges of murder by abuse or neglect and manslaughter if parents or guardians were substituting prayer for medical treatment.

NATIONWIDE

Four states have no religious immunities in criminal and civil codes. In those areas, state courts have ruled that such immunity laws are unconstitutional because they violate the 14th Amendment, which offers all citizens equal opportunity under the law, according to Rita Swan, president of Children's Health Care Is a Legal Duty (CHILD). Five states--Arkansas, Ohio, Iowa, Delaware, West Virginia--have a religious defense for charges of...