PERSPECTIVES

In 1989, an 11-year-old boy named Ian Lundman died in his home. Six years later, the reverberations of his death are still being felt, not only in his home town of Independence, Minnesota, but also in the Supreme Court of the United States. Although any death of a young child is tragic, the issues surrounding Ian's death were unusually complicated and charged with powerful ethical and political tensions.

Ian Lundman was raised in a Christian Scientist family. One of the fundamental precepts of the Christian Scientist church is a reliance on prayer to heal illness to the absolute exclusion of conventional medical care. Therefore, when Ian complained of stomach pains, his family, in strict compliance with and full faith in the proscriptions of the Church, began to pray.

As Ian's illness, diagnosed as diabetes, got progressively worse, his parents enlisted the aid of the Christian Science practitioners--not medical doctors--who sat with Ian and led the family in reading hymns. Despite these valiant efforts, Ian died. Medical experts testified during the trial that a routine shot of insulin would have saved Ian's life.

Tragic, and morally charged. However, what propelled this case into the political arena was a different issue entirely. Ian's parents were divorced. He lived with his mother and stepfather, both of whom are devout Christian Scientists. His father, Douglass Lundman, with whom Ian did not live, is not.

Mr. Lundman brought his ex-wife, her husband and the two practitioners who sat by Ian's bed to court. A Minnesota state jury held these four responsible for Ian's death and awarded Ian's father $1.5 million for civil damages, the first time an award was obtained for the death of a child due to Christian Scientist methods, according to Michael McConnell, a University of Chicago law professor quoted in the New York Times on January 23.

Less than two weeks ago, the Supreme Court rejected the appeal, thus upholding the state's decision. According to the Court, Ian's mother, step-father and the two practitioners were negligent. They had a responsibility to the child to take him to the hospital; in their decision to enlist prayer and not medicine, they were accomplices in his death.

In many respects, the Court's decision falls into the larger category of parental responsibilities to children. If a mother leaves her child alone for a number of days and he dies of starvation, she is responsible--despite the fact that she did not actively harm him. In some cities, if a kid is playing hooky from school, her parents can be put in jail--even though they themselves broke no laws. When a child dies because his or her parents neglected to provide medical care, the parents are similarly held accountable for their lack of attention and their parental irresponsibility.

However, one could read this case as part of a long line of very different decisions having to do not with parental responsibility but with parental freedom regarding the First Amendment's guarantee of the free exercise of religion. America has a strong tradition of respecting parents' right to make religious decisions for their children.

For example, in 1972, the Supreme Court in William v. Yoder allowed the Old Order Amish to remove their children from public schools after the eighth grade, even in the face of compulsory education laws that required further schooling. The decision was based on the argument that schooling for Amish children might undermine the traditional Amish way of life.

The Court's recent decision is particularly complicated because it falls exactly at the intersection of two extremely compelling moral claims: on the one hand, freedom of religion, and on the other, commitment to life. In the case of the Christian Scientists, the use of modern medicine for the sake of supporting life directly contradicts their religious convictions. For the state to dictate that modern science be used in cases of illness is, to the Christian Scientists, a direct affront to their understanding of the inalienable and sacred right of freedom of religion.

One could argue, as many have, that Ian's mother had a right to follow the dictates of her religion and that the American legal system has no copyright on ethics. As Stephen Carter wrote in the New York Times on January 31, "Like most parents, I would make a different decision than Ian Lundman's parents did. But a family's religious freedom should not be limited by what other families would do."

However, religious choice has never had free reign in our society. It is illegal to sacrifice animals for ritual purposes, not to speak of killing human beings. Although religious freedom is one of the foundational values of the United States, as a society, we have made a claim for the universal value of life. The Minnesota State Court of Appeals that decided in favor of Mr. Lundman directly addressed the issue of freedom of religion as delineated in the First Amendment. In the words of the Court: "Although one is free to believe what one will, religious freedom ends when one's conduct offends the law by, for example, endangering a child's life. The undisputed facts show that Ian's caregivers failed to seek medical help in the three days leading to his death, despite continuous and dramatic indications that Ian was ill with a life-threatening disease--first seriously, then gravely--and that he would die, given continued reliance on Christian Scientist prayer."

There is a latent danger in the Court's decision, a danger that minority religions will be suffocated in the name of universal societal values. As Carter writes: "Without [religious] freedoms...religious communities whose values differ from the mainstream might be unable to survive.... Our self-righteous certainty that we know all the answers might lead us to decide that religions whose values are too different from ours do not deserve to survive."

Although this is a legitimate concern, in a situation where a child's life is at stake, the state has a moral duty to step in and support life. I am not arguing that prayer should be forbidden--recent medical advances have proven that we no longer know exactly what methods are most effective in the healing process.

However, there is no question that in cases of life and death, we must galvanize all the resources at our disposal to save the life in danger. Carter writes that "the death of any child is a tragedy--but it is not a greater tragedy because it occurs as devout family members pray rather than as noble physicians struggle." What he should have written is that the greater tragedy is when a child like Ian dies because his or her parents are closed to the many kinds of healing, because they do not have devout family members praying and noble physicians struggling as both work together to save a life.