Some states allow religious exemptions from required testing of newborns for metabolic disorders, such as the inability to break down fats or amino acids, that can kill an untreated child but are perfectly treatable if caught early. Some states allow exemptions from giving newborns hearing tests or prophylactic eyedrops that can prevent blindness in infants infected with herpes. Seven states allow religious exemptions from testing children for lead levels in their blood, and six even allow religious exemptions to students learning about disease in school. In perhaps the most bizarre and potentially dangerous law, public school teachers in California can legally refuse to be tested for tuberculosis on religious grounds.
Quote:
These exemptions have produced the expected result: Hundreds of children have gotten sick and died because their parents resorted to faith rather than medicine. I cover this ongoing tragedy, one of the most serious conflicts between rationality and superstition, in my new book, Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, and you can read more in Caroline Fraser’s God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church and Paul Offit’s Bad Faith. These children either have no choice in their treatment or are not mature enough to make informed decisions. Some, like children of Jehovah’s Witnesses who die from refusing blood transfusions, are even extolled as “Youths who put God first.” All of them are martyrs to their parents’ religion.
Most of these deaths are needless. A 1998 medical study analyzed cases of child mortality due to faith-based medical neglect and found that of the 172 deceased, 140 had conditions that would have been curable with a probability of greater than 90 percent, while another 18 would have been cured with a probability between 50 and 90 percent. All but three of the children would have been helped by real medical care. Here are two of the children killed by religious parents who abjured doctors:
'A 2-year-old child aspirated a bite of banana. Her parents frantically called other members of her religious circle for prayer during nearly an hour when signs of life were still present.
One teenager asked teachers for help getting medical care for fainting spells, which she had been refused at home. She ran away from home, but law enforcement returned her to the custody of her father. She died three days later from a ruptured appendix.'
Parents should NOT be allowed to make decisions to do with their child's health based on religion.
Basically this. Most religious people are smart enough to realize there's a reason things like doctor's exist. This exemption needs to be taken away, though
This exemption needs to be taken away, though