This week Tina Carlsen “kidnapped” her 9-month-old son, Riley, from a hospital to seek alternatives to kidney surgery which doctors and the state insist are necessary to save the child’s life.
The case brings into very sharp focus what happens when doctors, who claim to be scientists, align themselves with a state that is based on mystical premises.
From the Seattle-PI:
Initially, the storyline seemed clear: Carlsen ignored a court order and secreted her baby out of Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center last week, even though child-welfare officials, concerned about medical neglect, had won custody of the boy. His mother, a 34-year-old homemaker, now faces up to a year in prison if convicted on second-degree kidnapping charges.
But the picture soon became murkier. Legal rulings hold that only in a medical emergency may the state override parents’ health care wishes — and physicians acknowledge that Riley was in no immediate danger of dying.
A growing chorus of family supporters sees the case as a frightening example of government authority overstepping its bounds, essentially forcing Carlsen to take drastic action by badgering her into compliance and preventing her from finding other treatment options for Riley.
[…]
In the past, such cases have forced the religiously orthodox to fight medical professionals. Bergman recalled several instances of Jehovah’s Witnesses refusing blood transfusions and forcing doctors to summon judges to hospitals for emergency medical rulings.
Almost always, he added, the medical establishment wins.
“Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow that they are free in identical circumstances to make martyrs of their children,” says the prevailing U.S. Supreme Court decision.
It was written in response to religiously based arguments against treatment, but the increasing popularity of alternative therapies may soon force courts to consider new issues in that arena. Last week, an Oregon woman hid her 4-year-old daughter from authorities for several days because the child was ill with pneumonia and her mother did not believe in using Western medicine to treat it. The woman, Jennifer Sullivan, 30, turned herself in to police last Friday.
Yet even in situations where conventional wisdom holds that the rules are ironclad — such as preschool shots for kids — there are loopholes.
“Everyone believes compulsory vaccinations are indeed compulsory, but in Washington, there’s a personal, or philosophical, exemption,” said Steve Calandrillo, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law who writes about debated areas of medicine. “You cannot compel a parent to vaccinate their child, even though a doctor could claim that’s medical negligence.”
In Riley’s case, a family physician did exactly that, said the child’s grandmother, Teena Thill. Twice, a nephrologist asked child-welfare authorities to investigate the family for failure to obey her medical orders, and twice, Thill said, caseworkers saw no reason to take action.
“The second social worker actually gave Tina a high-five and said, ‘You’re doing a wonderful job with that baby, keep up the good work,’ ” she said.
Carlsen had been using alternative therapies — baths, herbs and a low-stress environment — to heal her son, with some success, Thill added. But disputes over his care had been ongoing, almost from birth. They erupted earlier this month when his physician insisted that the baby begin a course of prescription medication to pave the way for kidney dialysis.
“The doctor told Tina, ‘You do what I tell you to do, or I will have the police at the door, taking that baby from you,’ ” Thill said. “They all said this was the only treatment.”
While there may be some scientific evidence that the child needs surgery and that surgery is the best available therapy, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that certain individuals have a “right” to substitute their own judgments for the judgments of others when their own life or property is not at stake.
Their is no scientific evidence of a “right” to use force against others, no scientific evidence of an obligation or responsibility to save the life of the child.
If we are to be rational and scientific about how to handle this case, we are not at liberty to make stuff up that doesn’t exist. There is no truth and no science outside of what exists.
Once you start making stuff up you are into the realm of lies and deception. Once you force others to believe in your delusions at the point of a gun, you are in violation of their most basic human liberties.
The difficulty in this case is that children cannot make their own choices and somebody has to make choices for them. States don’t have a mind or the ability to make choices so this case boils down to other individuals attempting to force their choices on the child by way of the child’s mother.
Science has taught us that nature has a plan for parents who make poor health care choices for their children. The children die and don’t pass along the parents’ genes. Those are scientific facts and it is also to the benefit of the species.
The existence of the “rights” that the doctors and the judges are claiming is not validated by science. Therefore they have stepped outside the realm of science into religion to engage in the use of force against the parent and child.
Smart people do what has the greatest chance greatest chance of preserving their own lives. In the case of a parent making choices for their child, smart parents do what will allow the child to live and pass the parents’ genes on.
While it is popular to assign human characteristics to states, just as people assign human characteristics to the God-concept, states are not human and have no human characteristics. Children are born to human parents. That’s a fact. They are not born to states. Humans have the biological capacity to have children and care for them. States do not have these abilities.
Building a society upon the mystical “right” to use force, forces the gene pool to adapt to that environment. It will favor the passing along of genes in the human population which make humans more prone to accept mystical, unfounded premises as fact, and substitute emotion for reason. It will ultimately make people less scientific in their thinking and more religious any mystical. This has already taken place as evidence by the behavior of the doctors and the judges in this case who are blurring the line between what exists (truth) and what doesn’t (the untruth).
If doctors are committed to better physical and mental health for human beings in general, they must do everything they can “sell” a scientific, rational approach to patients. Rational parents will make the right choice and be rewarded with the survival of their rational genes.
But the existence of a “right” to use of force, unless it is in self-defense, is not backed by any evidence. The use of force will only cause genes that predispose humans to irrational thinking to survive and gain an advantage in the gene pool. So the position of the judges and doctors in this case is unscientific and ultimately anti-reason and in violation of every human being’s right to think freely and rationally with the equipment that nature gave him.
Furthermore, there are hundreds of millions, if not billions of people around the world who would love to have access to western treatments for disease and would benefit from them. If this were not true, there would be no need for the recent announcements regarding the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Rather than sticking guns in the face of Tina Carlsen and forcing these therapies on her and her child, which only puts her into her natural self-defense mode, take the knowledge and treatments where they are needed AND wanted. If you’re selling a good product that saves lives, people will want it. You don’t have to force it on them unless they’re not too bright to begin with.