Clicky link: Medicine, Religion Collide in Chemo Refusal

It seems like this happens once a year; some pair of people who were both dropped on their heads as babies and by a stroke of luck married and had a child decide that giving that child medical care is somehow a bad idea. Confused as to why the magical man in the sky isn't healing their kid, they flail like dying fish and throw the bible around until something happens. Not often enough, what happens is jail. Too often, what happens is a dead kid.

I don't understand how there is any confusion over whether or not this is child abuse. One form of child abuse is neglect - failing to give the child what they must have pertaining to physical, emotional or educational needs. Physical needs include their health, which includes getting help for them if they are sick or injured. Refusing to treat a fatal illness is neglect - it's child abuse. Period. You can shake your Jesus stick all you want, but it doesn't change the facts.

Apparently the kid, Daniel, also thinks that chemotherapy is a bad idea. What he thinks, however, is far from relevant in this case. He was clearly raised by a pair of idiots to become one himself - children have parents and guardians to make decisions for them when they are too uneducated or confused, or too young, to make them themselves. Children don't get to make the big decisions because they're generally incapable of doing so, and this situation is no exception. Your kid breaks his arm and says he doesn't want to go to the hospital and get it set. Do you listen to him, knowing that what he wants to do is a terrible idea and bad for his well-being? Of course not. You take him to the hospital and get his arm set in a cast for the same reason you force your children to eat vegetables instead of pixie stix. You know better and they don't. This isn't to say all decisions parents make are correct and in the best interest of the child, nor that all decisions children make are foolish. But in regards to health and medical treatment, in a non-abusive household, parents are going to do the right thing.

Daniel's mother took the kid and ran off, in protest to him receiving chemotherapy. What gets me is that he's already HAD IT once before, so anything they're trying to avoid has already been done. This, as most cases similar to it are, is partially based on religious reasoning - they want to "do no harm" to their son. That's a shame. But I don't see anything in the bible (they are Roman Catholics) prohibiting cancer treatment, probably because they had no fucking idea how to treat cancer when the bible was supposedly written in the first place. They didn't even know what cancer was. If they had, they would have prayed to god to help them out, which from the case of Madeline Kara Neumann (and also from common sense) we know does not help in any way whatsoever. Prayer is not medicine, prayer will never be medicine. Any parents who allow their child to die while they light candles and tug on a rosary are criminally neglectful and should be punished as harshly as possible, no two ways about it. They're fully aware that their son is sick - and that his learning disability prevents him from even knowing anything is wrong with him apparently - and are doing nothing to help him despite the lymphoma being "highly curable".

Chemotherapy and a foster home are in order here.