Another innocent teen dead ... another law protecting the kooks who let him die

Zachery Swezey, a 17-year-old from Carlton, Washington, recently died from what was revealed to be a burst appendix. Anyone who's ever been through an appendicitis will know, very vividly, just how agonizing it is. Take PZ Myers' account of it, for example:

I had severe appendicitis as a child, and their description of it is mild: sure, there was vomiting — like an acid geyser firing up your throat. They don't even mention the agony and the fever and the intermittent loss of consciousness.

Sounds fun. Like liquid fire bubbling in your chest and sporadically spurting out.

Now, back to Zachery Swezey. You see, his situation, which started seemingly mild enough, quickly went from bad to worse. What his parents originally thought was food poisoning or the flu quickly progressed into something far worse, and soon enough Swezey was effectively on his deathbed. What's more – his parents knew this full well.

But what's more still – they didn't do a damned thing about it. They literally left him there to die in agony ... whilst trying faith-healing.

The day his son died, Greg Swezey told sheriff's investigators he knew Zakk would die 10 or 15 minutes before the teenager passed away. His condition had gotten much worse about an hour and a half before Zakk died, he told the investigators, and he realized Zakk was exhibiting some of the symptoms of death he'd seen when older church members died.

He did not consider calling an ambulance, he told them. But both he and his wife told investigators that they gave Zakk that option, although it was not clear from records when the choice was offered.

Right. Because allowing kids to determine their own healing and medical methods has thus proven to be such a good idea.

So, he chose not to call an ambulance and have his son, whom he knew was in his last throes, rushed off to the hospital for emergency life-saving treatment. Nope – instead, he did what any sensible believer in faith-healing does: he phoned some other kooks from his church (the Church of the Firstborn (warning: obnoxious website)) so they could hurry on over and ... splash the kid with oil and pray.

Yeah, that sounds terribly effective. Too bad so few of their patients survive to tell the tale of how these miracle magicians saved their lives.

So, we have a case of faith-healing-believing kooks who had more love in their dogma and ridiculous beliefs than in their own son, and decided to let him die a slow, exceedingly painful death rather than use modern, endlessly-proven medicine. As bad as that is, it's however not the worst thing about this whole sordid affair. No; what's worse? These sorry excuses for "parents" will likely never see the courts telling them just how stupid they were, as Washington, usually accredited as being one of the more sensible states, actually has a law on the books that specifically covers such cases and relieves Christian faith-healers (but not kooks from other religions) having to face justice.

Most states, including Washington, have child abuse laws that allow some religious exemptions for parents who do not seek medical treatment when their children are sick.

Washington's law specifies that a person treated through faith healing "by a duly accredited Christian Science practitioner in lieu of medical care is not considered deprived of medically necessary health care or abandoned." Other religions are not mentioned.

This law is a travesty on any number of levels. First, there is no such thing as "Christian Science". Christianity, and anything about it, is not scientific. It is the exact antithesis of the methodical study of the world that is science. I wonder what it means to be "duly accredited" in Christian "Science".

Also, the law is wrong in many other ways: it allows (Christian) faith-healers to do whatever the hell they want in terms of pronouncing silly incantations and splashing vapid substances over their patients (or "victims", rather) instead of requiring patients to undergo actual medical treatment; it then allows these kooks and supreme quacks to escape justice when their patients victims eventually expire from neglect and lack of proper care; it's cruel to patients who may be subjected, perhaps against their will, to such lack of proper healthcare due to their family's faith-healing beliefs; and, on a lesser level, it discriminates against other religions (which, in itself, is probably grounds for having it knocked out of the lawbooks).

Seriously, Washingtonians, you need to get this travesty-of-a-law off the books. Quacks, kooks and nuts need to face justice when they allow their ridiculous beliefs to come before the lives of their own children (or anyone else for that matter). For anyone who's ever died because of bullshit like this – for Kara Neumann, for Zakk Swezey, for the countless other unnamed – tear that law down and stop unneeded deaths like these from ever happening again.

(via Pharyngula)

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