Credo, non credo, whatever
Watch out for beliefs.
[Judge] Rodenberg found Daniel has only a “rudimentary understanding at best of the risks and benefits of chemotherapy. … he does not believe he is ill currently. The fact is that he is very ill currently.”…Johnson, the parents’ attorney, said everyone should be able to get medical care that follows their beliefs. “The Hausers believe that the injection of chemotherapy into Danny Hauser amounts to an assault upon his body”…The Hausers, who have eight children, are Roman Catholic and also believe in the “do no harm” philosophy of the Nemenhah Band. The Missouri-based religious group believes in natural healing methods advocated by some American Indians.
But what the Hausers ‘believe’ is beside the point here in the most fundamental way. It’s beside the point in the same way as it would be beside the point to ‘believe’ that one could stand in front of an approaching high-speed train and be undamaged because one was holding a magic amulet. The Hausers’ ‘beliefs’ make no difference to what is happening inside their son’s body and to what would change that, any more than anyone’s ‘beliefs’ make any difference to what a moving train does to a human body. The train does what it does, lymphoma does what it does, chemo does what it does. What’s needed here is not belief but knowledge. The oncologist knows what chemotherapy does to lymphoma, and the Hausers don’t know, and they apparently don’t know that they don’t know and don’t know that the oncologist does know – or else they do know but choose to decide not to ‘believe’ it. They shouldn’t do that, any more than they should tell their kid to stand in the path of a high speed train while holding a magic amulet.
Rodenberg wrote that Daniel claims to be an elder in the band, but does not know what that means. Daniel also says he is a medicine man under Nemenhah teachings but can’t say how he became a medicine man or what teachings he has had to become one. He also noted that at age 13, Daniel can’t read. “He lacks the ability to give informed consent to medical procedures,” Rodenberg said…According to Daniel’s court testimony, he believes the chemo will kill him, and said: “I’d fight it. I’d punch them and I’d kick them.”
His parents have failed to make sure he knows how to read, and have apparently failed to correct his mistaken belief that the chemo will kill him as opposed to probably saving him. Beliefs are beside the point here, and being beside the point, they are lethal.
These people shouldn’t be allowed to raise children.
Since when do parents have the right to sacrifice the lives of their children for religious reasons? If the Aztecs were still around, would people be defending their right to live in accordance with their religious beliefs by murdering their children?
The doctrine of “parental choice” is pernicious nonsense.
The free exercise clause strikes again.
Terrible thing, that clause.
This is sickening. . .
A bit off topic but that never stopped me. . . Aztecs didn’t murder their children. They mostly murdered other people’s children, the warriors they captured. They captured lots of them, plenty for the sacrifices they needed to make. (One reason that other groups who spoke the same language as the Aztecs Nahuatl happily joined up with Cortes and his band of 40 syphilitics to go after them). In some accounts, the honor of being a sacrificed warrior is mentioned.
But in answer to your question, things are stupid enough at this point that yes, there would be someone available to defend the right of parents to murder their child. The Hausers are in effect setting up and awaiting the death of their son. Some would say this constituted homicide. . . They should be arrested for abusing a child with some kind of learning disability. . .
Or we could just say a Darwin Award is going to a pig-ignorant family here.
Yes, we could, but it’s more interesting to say something more interesting than that.
I fear, Jakob, that some people would. I remember a particularly risible doco about the Aztecs in which thr presenter repeated strees that we had to understand their actions in the contexts of their beliefs. By about the tenth time he said that I was shouting at the TV: “yes, but who has the power to enforce those beliefs”
In many ways, I find the most horrible part of that story the simple fact that a 13 year old boy has not been properly taught how to read and write! Nothing has been mentioned in any of the coverage of this case that Daniel suffers from a serious learning disability or any other cognitive deficits, nor does the judge’s decision cite such factors in ruling that he is not competent to decide for himself. So it clearly isn’t just the faith-based idiocy of his parents that is deforming this boy’s life, it is their complete failure to fulfill their responsibility – to Daniel and to society – to help him become a functioning, mature, contributing intellectual and moral adult. In the 21st century, at a bare minimum that includes teaching the boy how to read and write, by damn!