The precedent of a court taking away a parents right to consent to treat or not treat their child for whatever they want.
They don't have that right. I don't know why you think they do. Parents don't have the right to feed their child as much or as little as they want either. They're responsible for basic care.
And, in the case of the US, forcing parents to undertake an enormous financial burden that could destroy them for the rest of their lives.
Nobody is talking about this. Nobody is claiming that parents should be required to fork over a million dollars for cancer treatment. This article is about a $200 blood transfusion that is required to save the child's life, and it's not being refused on the basis of money, it's being refused on the basis of religion.
The precedent is very simple. If the doctor decides you're not making the right decision, he can use a case like that as legal precedent to have whatever treatment he deems necessary to save or prolong a life.
Again, and I hate to keep harping on this but you need to start thinking of it, consider the food scenario. If you're underfeeding your child a doctor won't have the final decision over removing the child from your custody or putting you in jail. I know people who have had trouble feeding their child (not for financial reasons) so I know a little about how it gets perceived among doctors.
Doctors will make recommendations. If parents are taking the appropriate steps, there will be no problem. If the parents are allowing the child to starve to death a doctor will probably call in a case worker to interview and evaluate the situation and find out whether reasonable steps are being taken. If, after much evaluation, documentation, interviews, rulings, and probably appeals, the situation still isn't rectified the child will be taken away. If the child dies, prosecution may be considered.
This is
no different from the scenario medically. If you're refusing treatment for your child, your situation will be evaluated - not by one doctor or case worker, but several doctors, case workers, and probably multiple judges. In the end, you can lose custody if you're refusing to provide the basic care that every child is entitled to.
If you don't think it's complicated with food, it's not complicated for medicine - because it works exactly the same way.
So, do you want your rights as a parent taken away.
Parents do not have the right to abuse their children.
If yes, do you want to foot the bill as a taxpayer, or do you want to foot the bill through your insurance when it goes up due to doctors being able to legally treat underage people without their parents consent?
Parents are required to foot the bill for taking care of the child they decided to have.
Oh boy. A payment plan on at least a hundred thousand dollars of debt. That sure does sound exciting. Of course, if you have insurance, then the wheel of profit gets to turn. The doctors make a lot of money. The drug companies make a lot of money. The doctor's insurance provider makes a lot of money. The families insurance...well...doesn't make money off of THEM. They have to make up that cash from all their other covered people who don't need any care. Thankfully, that still amounts to millions of dollars, so that's ok. And, chances are, the hospital doesn't make much money unless it's a privately owned hospital.
You're describing medical insurance - which definitely works in the case of childhood cancer. It's rare, so it gets funded by people who don't want to take the risk of having to fund it themselves or watch their child die.
Definitely not. They had no way of paying for it, and dentists are not obligated to treat people for free.
Absolutely they should. If parents allow their child to starve to death because "they had no way of paying for it" and grocery stores aren't required to feed people for free - would you still say they should not be prosecuted?
I do not understand your position that parents should not be required to pay anything for their child at any point. If you can't afford to have a child
DON'T HAVE A CHILD. Had one by accident that you can't afford? Find someone who can afford it and is willing to take care of them.
It really is that simple. You can't have a kid and refuse to care for them. Oh and the government doesn't have to help you.
And yes, the charity is great when it's available, but if it's not? You guys are all talking about this specific situation. I'm trying to ask about discussions for the larger implications. I guess nobody wants to talk about that. They'd rather talk about food and justify how these specific acts were right. I'm not arguing any of that. I'm trying to go somewhere else, and unsurprisingly, that's something nobody wants to talk about.
I'm talking about the larger situation. I don't know why you think otherwise. None of what I have said is so narrow that it applies only to this situation.
I'm asking questions, and they're mostly just being avoided.
I've answered every single one.
Is that really something you want boatloads of your tax money being spent on? Government oversight on parents who don't grant consent to treatment?
Yes. Child abuse is a problem that falls directly within the government's charter - the protection of human rights.
children don't actually have many legal rights at all.
Try running one over, see what happens.
Parents very often deny treatment for various reasons to children. It's not uncommon, and there's nothing wrong with that.
There's nothing wrong with it unless it is critical basic care. In which case it's child abuse.
Consider the case of the young woman with the flesh eating bacteria. Without all her amputations, she would've very likely died. She had no legal say in any of the treatments given to her. If the parents had decided that they didn't want to start hacking off her daughters limbs, they would not be prosecuted. It's their right to say "we don't want that for our child." That's the point of having consent. You can either give it or not give it. What is the point in even having a consent law if it can be flat out overruled?
...and they shouldn't be prosecuted. It's up to the parents to decide what the child's life is worth
beyond a minimum threshold.
That treating cancer is like going to the grocery store to buy a bag of beans to feed your family? Yeah. I'll continue with blowing that one off.
No, setting a broken arm is like going to the grocery store and buying a bag of beans to feed your family. Treating cancer is like buying your kid a grocery store.
And if the parent decides the odds aren't good? What about when the parent decides to stop? What if the parent wants to go with less chemo? That's what I'm talking about. Plenty of parents have been well documented stopping cancer treatment so that their dying kids have better quality of life for their final months/years instead of double that time and making it hell.
There's nothing wrong with that decision, and it is the parents
responsibility (note I don't say right) to make that decision. I'm talking about the bigger picture than cancer treatment here. I'm trying to have a larger discussion than just this one particular case.
Consider, for a moment, a child who does not get a polio vaccination (because parents were unwilling to pay the $40 for it). The child eventually develops polio and eventually develops paralysis. The parents continue to refuse to treat the child - eventually the child's respiratory system fails and the child dies.
Consider, for a moment, a child who develops one of the bazillions of infections that children can get. The parents refuse to pay the $50 for antibiotics (prescription and pills), and the infection spreads killing the child.
Consider, for a moment, the child who breaks their arm playing on the jungle gym. The parents refuse to pay the $2000 required to set the arm properly. The break does not heal and eventually the arm needs to be amputated (my wife very nearly had her arm amputated because she fell of the monkey bars if you think this is far fetched - though it wasn't because her parents refused care).
Consider, for a moment, the child who dies of malnutrition after years of being underfed because the parents didn't want to pay the $2000 for the food necessary to keep them healthy.
Consider, for a moment, the child who grows to age 18 without learning how to read, write, add, or multiply, and has a functional vocabulary of a 6 year old. This adult is now unable to function in society due to lack of education and has missed an important window in childhood development where such education is much more readily accepted by the brain. This because the parents refused to pay the $5000 (or time) necessary to educate their child with these skills.
Some of these result in death, others result in permanent physical or mental damage. All of them are criminal examples of child neglect, and should result in incarceration of the parents and (where possible) removal of custody of the child.
Cancer is an easy thing to point a finger at. Basic medical care, the kind that might not seem pressing at the time, can still be just as much of an issue. This woman was not able to provide care that her son needed. Of course she wasn't charged for anything. She made what she thought was the right call at the time. Fix an aching tooth or put food on the table for the family?
If a parent is having to make that call, they should give the kids up for adoption. "Fix an aching tooth" could just as easily be replaced with "get an education" or "pay rent". All of these are things required of parents. If they cannot provide them, they should find people who can.
If it were up to me, the parents in the link you provided would lose custody of all of their children and would be incarcerated for child abuse.
Edit:
Just in case I didn't make it extremely clear:
Poverty is not an excuse to abuse your child. The child should only be entrusted to people capable of caring for it.
