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Old 06-06-2004, 07:35 PM   #2
Lady Sidhe
That's my story and I'm stickin' to it....
 
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: Hammond, La.
Posts: 978

Death and Escape

U.S. death toll among infants and children: In 1998-APR, Dr. Seth Asser, a critical-care pediatrician at Methodist Children's Hospital in San Antonio, and Rita Swan, head of the advocacy group Children's Healthcare is a Legal Duty (CHILD) authored a paper in the professional journal Pediatrics. Asser studied 172 reported deaths of infants and children between 1975 and 1995. Deaths were found in 34 states among members of 23 religious groups. They belonged to families of Christian Scientist, Faith Tabernacle, Faith Assembly and several other religious groups that practice faith healing. He compared the cause of death with the expected survival rates if the children had received routine medical care. They found:
140 children would have had a 90% chance of surviving if they had been treated medically
18 children would have had a 50 to 90% chance of surviving
11 children would have benefited from medical care
3 would not have been helped from medical care


any of the conditions and diseases that killed the 172 children were "ordinary ailments seen and treated routinely" e.g. appendicitis, labor complications, dehydration, antibiotic-sensitive bacterial infections and vaccine-preventable disorders. They cited cases in which:
A 2 year old child choked on a piece of banana and died an hour later, while her parents frantically gathered other church members into a circle to pray.
Children with an infection who would have been saved with a single injection of penicillin.
Babies who would have lived if they received oxygen.
Five mothers died from relatively common and treatable complications during labor.
Several children died after long periods of terribly painful suffering. 5,6

The article concludes: "The children of members of faith-healing sects deserve the same protections under the law as other children have. We believe that the repeal of exemption laws is a necessary step toward assuring such protection...before hundreds more children suffer needlessly and die prematurely."




Legal information on faith healing

Interesting
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Last edited by Lady Sidhe; 06-06-2004 at 07:41 PM.
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