Religion Cannot Justify Child Abuse
A protest against religiously-notivated medical neglect
June 8, 2009
11:30 AM - 3:30 PM
Mary Baker Eddy Library
200 Massachuetts Avenue
Boston
Imagine you are a 7-year-old child awakening in the night with sharp abdominal pains. Your parents arrive at your side, feel your fever and look concerned. Then they tell you not to worry, that it's all in your head, and they will pray with you to correct your illusion of illness. The next day you're much worse and a woman from your church comes to pray with you, too. But you can no longer, doubled-up in pain, vomiting, unable to eat, crying and screaming in pain. Rather than taking you to a hospital, your parents tell you to be quiet, that if you believed in your prayers then all would be well. After you slip into a coma, you die the next morning... of a ruptured appendix. Your brother and sister are told not to cry, that you have merely passed into the next plane of existence and this episode is not to be spoken of again.
Since the 1970s, more than 300 such cases have been documented in which children have died and many more become disabled because their parents chose to treat their medical conditions with ineffective spiritual remedies rather than medical treatments. Many of these families were members of the First Church of Christ, Scientist. Christian science has actively lobbied for special exemptions from child abuse laws, allowing their members to continue denying children medical care. Unfortunately, elected legislators have too often succumbed to that political pressure. In communities where the law does disallow such neglect, prosecutors have been known to refuse to press charges against parents, being wary of seeming too eager to criticizing the supposedly unrestricted right to practice one's faith. The tragedy is that the faith of some parents has been known to kill their children.
For the past five years, picketers have gathered to protest these vile policies during the Christian Science annual meeting in early June. The protest creates community awareness of the political complacency and legal loopholing that allows these unnecessary deaths. The protesters also intend to announce to the Christian Scientists in attendance that their dangerous, irrational, and archaic practices are not excused by the freedom of religion enjoyed in this country. The Supreme Court has stated that parents may be free to make martyrs of themselves but not of their children.
The protest organizers -- Dr. Seth Asser, a pediatrician dedicated to the cause of protecting children from medical neglect; the non-profit advocacy group Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty, Inc; the RI skeptics Society; the RI Atheist Society; and the Boston Atheists -- invite all interested parties to join this year's event, to help protest the practice of child abuse by medical neglect among religions like the Christian Science Church.
Our special guests this year include actual victim-survivors of Christian Science medical neglect. Additionally, we will be holding a mock funeral memorial for members of the Church from Massachusetts that have died in recent memory.
Mark your calendars for Monday, June 8th. Early June tends to have exceptionally nice weather in Boston and its a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon in the fresh air and amongst friends. The location is 200 Massachusetts Ave in Boston, a block east of the Boston Pops. We typically begin at around 11:30 AM, march and distribute informational handouts until the formal festivities began inside the Mother Church at 1:30 PM. We then take a lunch break and resume around 2:45 PM in time for the members to leave when the meeting is over at 3 PM.
To RSVP, please visit the BA Meetup calendar at http://www.meetup.com/bostonatheists/calendar/10215164, the RI Atheists Society calendar at http://www.meetup.com/Atheist/calendar/10425591/, or the Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=45890093398.
Protest Program
- The main session of the church's annual meeting is from 1:30 PM to 3 PM.
- We begin picketing at 11:30 starting point, 200 Massachusetts Ave.
- We will dress in black and carry signs and child-sized coffins with names and photos.
- At 12:30 PM, we will hold a press conference where our victim guests will have a chance to tell the world about their experiences at the hands of these medieval villains.
- As they file in for their meeting, the members may approach you to tell you all about their stories of healing. You may not fully understand how deluded some of them are until you hear it from their own mouths.
- It gets quiet on the plaza during the meeting, so we'll break for lunch It's a great chance to meet and appreciate the many freethinkers from around the region.
- We will return just before 3 to "greet" the members as they file out, for about an hour.
A survivor's story
Several adults who were traumatized by Christian Science medical neglect will be attending this year's protest. Coming from Ithaca, NY, will be Liz Heywood and her daughters and friends. Here is Liz's story in her own words:
I was a third-generation Christian Scientist who grew up fifteen miles from The Mother Church in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1975 when I was thirteen, a bone disease developed in my left knee overnight. At the time it was legal in Massachusetts to treat a child through prayer alone, and my parents viewed my knee's infection as "a challenge to demonstrate my true spiritual being." Consequently, although I could not get out of bed for almost a year, I had no medicine or painkillers while my infected leg drained. I spent another six months in a wheelchair and eighteen months on crutches and eventually my knee fused itself. My family and I had followed the instructions of our Christian Science practitioner--a man well-regarded by the church who later became a Teacher of practitioners--to the letter, but my leg was scarred, deformed and frozen at an angle of about eighty degrees. There was no "science" involved in the ordeal whatsoever. My practitioner later told me that I had been healed because I didn't die. At fifteen I was left limping, ashamed of my failure to "manifest my perfection" and depressed to the point of considering suicide. I was told by my practitioner, church and family that my "complete" healing would happen eventually.
It was twenty years before I left Christian Science, when recurring mental breakdowns finally caused me to find a therapist. In 1995 I was diagnosed me with severe post-traumatic stress disorder; my infection had been osteomyelitis, a bone disease caused by a strep bacteria and medically treated with antibiotics. Recovering mentally was difficult; I had to re-learn how to think. My years of hard emotional work paid off: in 2007, when my physical health had become jeopardized by thirty years of limping, I was prepared to make the decision to have my leg amputated above the knee. Today I lead an active life free from shame.
Most Christian Scientists never face extremely serious conditions in their children, and this has allowed the church to claim it has a viable method of treatment. But Christian Scientists do everything in their power to deny and remain unimpressed by human pain. And refusing to believe in the pain--any pain--felt by a child is pure negligence.