c. 1998 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ Just before Christmas 1996, 1-year-old Patrick Foster caught a bad cold. As the sniffling persisted, Daniel and Anne Marie Foster did what they had always done when one of their three children got sick: They prayed the devil would be driven away.
But regardless of how sick Patrick got, there would be no visit to a doctor. And no medical treatment, not even an aspirin.
The Fosters’ church, the Faith Tabernacle Congregation Church in North Philadelphia, teaches that God, inspired by the prayers of true believers, will heal sickness and disease. For church members, as for thousands of faith-healing Christians across the United States, to seek a doctor’s care would be to turn their backs not only on their faith, but on God himself.
Patrick was in the Lord’s hands, Anne Marie Foster would tell police.
But Patrick was not healed. As winter turned to spring, he became more lethargic and gaunt. It was March when Daniel and Anne Marie Foster noticed the growth bulging from their son’s left side.
As the growth swelled, the Fosters increased their prayers. Four times each week they attended services at Faith Tabernacle, asking their pastor to pray aloud for Patrick.
Then, one day in early May, a neighbor saw the listless boy sitting on his father’s lap on the front steps. Patrick’s body was so wracked that he needed his father’s help just to lift his head.
The neighbor called the child abuse hot line.
Social worker Michael Bonetti arrived only hours after the phone call. By now the growth weighed six pounds, almost a third of Patrick’s weight. A pinkish rash covered the boy’s cheeks and hands. His left eye was swollen shut; his lips were cracked and white from dehydration.
Bonetti urged the Fosters to rush Patrick to a hospital. They refused. The following afternoon Bonetti returned with the police and a court order demanding the Fosters release Patrick to a doctor’s care.
At St. Christopher’s Hospital, doctors said Patrick likely would have died in another 24 hours. The large mass growing from his abdomen was a Wilm’s tumor, a common form of childhood cancer that 90 percent of patients survive if they receive prompt treatment.
Doctors removed the tumor but doubted Patrick would live. He spent six months in the hospital, his parents and extended family always at his side. The prayers were never-ending.
But the battle over what was best for Patrick Foster was just beginning.
Until 1985 Pennsylvania rarely prosecuted faith healers. That year the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a faith-healing couple whose son died of untreated cancer. Since then, prosecutors have routinely investigated complaints of abuse or deaths of Faith Tabernacle children and taken their parents to court, if necessary, to protect lives.
Last April’s edition of the medical journal Pediatrics included a study that documented 172 faith-related child deaths in the United States between 1975 and 1995. The authors said 140 of the children died from conditions for which survival rates with medical care exceeded 90 percent. The deaths occurred in 23 religious denominations in 34 states, including 20 in the Faith Tabernacle congregation.
Across the country, 43 states grant faith-healing parents sweeping immunities from prosecution on child neglect and abuse charges. Six states grant immunity on religious grounds for manslaughter, homicide or murder by abuse.
One of the six is Oregon, where the Clackamas County district attorney elected not to prosecute the parents of an 11-year-old Oregon City boy who died of untreated diabetes.
The controversial decision pulled that state into a long-simmering national debate: At what point does a parent’s right to exercise free religion conflict with the state’s duty to protect every child’s basic right to life?
Police saw Bo Phillips’ death as a clear case of abuse because the state medical examiner ruled the disease was easily treatable. “If you or I did this to our child, we would be prosecuted,” said Jeff Green, a Clackamas County sheriff’s detective.
But District Attorney Terry Gustafson did not take the case to a grand jury. Instead, she called for legal reform. Gustafson said Oregon’s criminal law _ which includes shields for faith healers _ is poorly worded and confusing, robbing faith-healing parents of their rights to due process.
Bo died in his parents’ bed Feb. 23 after days of painful symptoms caused by diabetes.
The family’s church, the Followers of Christ Church in Oregon City, has amassed one of the largest concentrations of child deaths in the United States over the last four decades. More than 70 children in the faith-healing church have died since 1955. Doctors say at least 21 of them, including Bo Phillips, could have been cured with basic medical care. In addition, three mothers have died in childbirth in the past 10 years.
Little is known about how most of the children died _ including 15 infants listed as stillborn _ because death investigations before 1985 were either inconclusive or nonexistent.
Across the country, various groups are battling to stop children’s deaths in faith-healing communities. Sometimes lawmakers spearhead the effort, sometimes child-advocate groups and sometimes prosecuting attorneys.
The leading lobbyist in favor of religious exemptions is the Christian Science Church.
Prosecuting faith-healing parents who refuse medical care for their ill children appears more related to the will of prosecutors and child advocates than to the specifics of any state’s laws.
Michigan has successfully prosecuted faith-healing parents for years. The state has no religious shield for homicide.
In Indiana, where one of the nation’s largest faith-healing churches was founded more than 30 years ago, district attorneys ignored dozens of child deaths for years before eventually bringing charges against two parents. But a strong lobbying effort by the Christian Science Church helped defeat efforts to eliminate Indiana laws that protect faith-healing practices.
In South Dakota, one woman led a grass-roots fight that resulted in the nation’s first law eliminating religious immunity for faith-healing parents.
Joni Clark married into a faith-healing church just after graduating from high school. She lost her first daughter, Libby, just days after she was born because her church, End Time Ministries, and her husband, wouldn’t allow a doctor to be called. She also nearly died from the trauma of labor.
Doctors later told Clark that Libby would have had a 99 percent chance of survival had she been born in a hospital.
“After my daughter died, the anger that I had, I never got over it,” Clark said.
Clark began a secret, personal war against the church, all the while having four other healthy girls without the help of modern medicine. She told other women about birth control and childhood diseases and helped them get proper treatment if their babies became ill.
“I could never get past the fact that women and children were paying the price in this group,” she said.
By the fall of 1986 she decided to leave the church, divorce her husband and go to law school.
In 1989 she began lobbying to get South Dakota to change its laws granting religious defenses for the crimes of child abuse, neglect and nonsupport. The law also allowed parents with religious objections the right to decline immunizations and metabolic screening for newborns.
Clark told her story to community service groups, legislators and anyone else who would listen. By 1990, the State Affairs Committee forwarded a bill to eliminate these religious privileges. The Christian Science Church and its lobbyists were the only opposition.
Later that year, after Clark testified in the Legislature, South Dakota became the first state in the nation to repeal its religious immunities, making it a crime to deny medical care to children.
In Pennsylvania, despite laws still on the books that offer some immunities to faith-healing believers, prosecutors have won case after case against parents whose children died after being denied medical care.
Prosecutors there frequently intervene in an attempt to save lives, as they did in the case of Patrick Foster.
Under court order, Patrick has lived for the past year with his aunt and uncle, Diane and Tim Foster. The judge allows Patrick to spend four hours a day with his parents and two siblings. One day each week, Patrick is allowed to visit his parents for eight hours. He says he loves his parents and knows they love him.
Daniel and Anne Marie Foster are not bad people, says Daniel’s brother, Tim. “They’re honest and loving. They believed they were doing what was best for Patrick.”
But a jury convicted them of conspiracy and child neglect, both felonies. In September, a judge sentenced them to 14 years’ probation and ordered regular medical treatments for their son.
The judge also ordered them to purchase health insurance for their three children, to buy a thermometer and to take classes at a local hospital on how to recognize childhood illnesses. And he warned them that if they ignore his orders, he will send them to jail.
“The criminal law is the way we draw lines for what is acceptable in our society,” said lead prosecutor Mimi Rose. “We also want the non-faith-healing community to know that this is not OK.”
The Fosters’ attorney, Arthur Jarrett, said loving parents shouldn’t be prosecuted for doing what they think is best for their children.
“It’s not neglect if you actually believe it and you do what your religion says to do to get healed and you do it fervently,” Jarrett said. “You can’t prosecute religion away. It does not alter the religious practice. Outside of venting a public desire, it furthers no interest.”
But to Rose, the prosecution is furthering the interest of Patrick, the one person in the case who cannot look out for himself.
Patrick’s aunt and uncle are not convinced he will be safe if he goes home.
“I’m not saying he shouldn’t see his parents,” Diane Foster said as her nephew scooted his tricycle across the back patio. “But he should be safe first. This is not religious freedom. Believe what you want. But Patrick doesn’t know God. He’s 3 years old.”
DEA END LARABEE
