Posted by
flagwaver on Saturday, May 23, 2009 10:09:17 AM
By now everyone that has been paying attention to the news is familiar with the story of 13 year old Danny Hauser and his mother who fled the jurisdiction of a family court in Minnesota after refusing to submit to chemotherapy to treat his blood cancer. His family has claimed that their religion discourages the use of medical procedures such as chemo, and they prefer to pursue a treatment based on alternative medicine and herbal/natural remedies. The medical establishment claims that the only effective treatment for young Mr. Hauser is the chemotherapy, without which they assure us he will most likely die. And when the medical establishment makes such a pronouncement and involves the courts, the courts come down squarely on the side of the medical establishment and decide that there is a "compelling state interest" in making sure that the boy goes through the chemo, because the state is committed to maing sure that he lives.
Maybe it's just me, maybe I have a little strak of the libertarian in me, but this decision reeks of statism. And it also smells of one part of the establishment using its coercive powers to prop up and legitimize the opinions of another part of the established order. It bothers me that on the say-so of medical experts the courts have decided that they have the right to tell the Hauser family that their religious rights have no effect in the life of their child. They are not allowed to make a decision on the medical treatment that their child faces, because it is not the normal way things are done. The court is in essence saying that they, in consultation with medical experts have the right to force a medical treatment on a child in spite of the wishes of the parents, and in the face of their religious beliefs. According to the state, the state has a more compelling interest in the child's well-being than the parents!
I do not really know what the religious practices are of the Hauser family, but it worries me to see a court decide that they have no religious rights that the court is bound to respect. We make allowances for religions that sacrifice small animals, we allow Wiccan worship, we allow radical Islam to be practiced in this country, but we suspend religious toleration when the medical establishment makes a godlike pronouncement on life and death? What is the point of a Constitution or the rights it lays out if courts and doctors can abrogate them at will?
I don't know what the right course of treatment is for Mr. Hauser, but I do know that I stand with the parents in their defiance of this court ordered treatment. If liberty is to mean anything, if we are to be truly free then we should be free to choose our own paths in life...including any medical treatment we choose to seek refuse. I refuse to believe that any judge, doctor, state employee, or government official is better able to make parental decisions or has the best interests of a child in mind more than a loving parent. While I understand the state have an interest in protecting the lives of children in abusive or neglectful circumstances, I don't see that interest in this case. What I see is a state and a medical establishment telling the parents of this boy, "The doctors say he will die without the treatments they are paid to dispense, and we know better than you how to raise your child. So do as we say, or we will hunt you down like you are the Unabomber." And that to me friends, is where statism butts against the rights of the individual...and I will always stand for the rights of the individual over the encroachment of the state into our lives.