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For some weeks now, I’ve been following the treatment and custody battle over  Sarah Hershberger, the 10-year-old Ohio Amish girl with leukemia. It is a heart-breaking story–her parents brought her to begin a two-year round of conventional treatment at a Ohio hospital and then, when she reacted badly to the treatments, decided to discontinue them. Except the hospital said the parents couldn’t make such a decision, and convinced a court to order the conventional treatments to continue, putting her treatment under the auspices of a hospital custodian. To keep control of their daughter, and to obtain more natural treatments, using herbs and vitamins, the parents left the country. 

 

David “Augie” Augenstein (under the pen name, David Michael) has been providing ongoing coverage of the situation, including interviews with the girl’s parents and grandfather, via his web site and on Facebook, and his aggressive reporting has led to the story being picked up by national media, including ABC News and the New York Daily News


I’ve wanted to write about this situation, but I haven’t been sure what to say. Augie has been playing up the contention of Sarah Hershberger’s parents that she has recovered via the natural treatments, and seems to be cancer free. That is a big leap, since leukemia, like many cancers, can return. I have seen conventional doctors quoted as saying that the initial hospital treatments were showing progress, and those may be responsible for the apparent remission of the disease. 


Part of my concern with focusing on the conventional-versus-natural treatment superiority is that most of us can’t say for sure, in advance, what we would do if faced with a situation like that facing the Hershberger family. Would we choose to force our child to endure the brutal conventional treatment, for which there is data showing good long-term survival rates (though little about serious side effects, like sterilization), or natural treatment, for which there is anecdotal evidence of favorable outcomes? 


I’ve come to realize that, however the question is answered, the choice should be up to the parents. And that is where this situation, and more like it, have crossed a boundary–in expanding State authority over parenting rights. 


It is a big deal when the State intervenes to overrule decisions made by caring and committed parents, as seemingly well intentioned as the State might seem to be. It seems as if such intervention should only be allowed in the most exceptional cases, involving abuse, negligence, and other exacerbating circumstances. 

 

Yet State intervention in serious parental medical decisions  seems to be happening more routinely. Augie has also chronicled a case of a Connecticut teenager he says has been “imprisoned” at Boston Children’s Hospital for nine months because of a disagreement between parents and medical practitioners over treatment. 

 

Fox News in Connecticut did an investigation, and came to pretty much the same conclusion about the application of excessive State power in the situation. 

 

What kind of threw me over the edge on this subject is an article in a current New Yorker magazine, about how an Egyptian woman in California lost custody of her three-year-old son–initially over an instance of neglect on her part– and then spent years in a losing battle to get him back from judge-ordered foster care. What is infuriating are the decisions by social workers, confirmed by judges, that somehow the mom didn’t pass parenting tests, try as she did to satisfy State concerns. The State even went to the trouble of entrapping the mother on charges of conspiracy to kidnap her child by getting an undercover officer to offer to help the mother plan for a way to take her child. (Fortunately, a jury saw through the State conniving, and acquitted the mother of serious criminal charges.) Beyond the State’s excesses, it is such a sad story because it runs counter to all norms and tradition about separating a mother (or father) from a young child–once again, in anything except the most extreme circumstances. 


There seemed to be no such extremes in the California case. The little boy made clear he wanted to be with his mother, who made a heroic effort to mend her ways, yet she couldn’t satisfy the State officials, who seemed to have decided early on they didn’t like the woman. She eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court to try to get her son back–nothing doing. She was reduced to a half-hour goodbye meeting when the boy was six, and then afterward watching for him to walk by at nearby grocery stores and such in hopes of catching a glimpse of her son. According to the New Yorker, this case isn’t unique. 

 

Since when did social workers and judges become the arbiters of proper parenting? When did doctors and nurses become the arbiters of which of several possible medical treatments to provide to one’s daughter or son in the event of serious illness? Maybe around the same time they became the arbiters of what we eat, deciding in their infinite wisdom that certain foods that many sensible people deem healthy are too risky, and that certain foods many sensible people deem risky are okay. 


Isn’t this what the most authoritarian states do, take over the parenting power for parents who somehow fail to meet ever-more-arbitrary State standards of proper social, medical, or political behavior?