Parents Pray as Daughter Dies of Treatable Diabetes

Dale and Leilani Neumann, who reside just outside Wassau, Wisconsin, lost their 11-year-old daughter Madeline to illness and death this week.

This was due to the fact that when their precious daughter was seriously ill, they decided that they should pray instead of take their child to see health care professionals.

It would seem that Dale and Leilani took literally the New Testament passage found in Matthew 18:19 in which it is written that Jesus uttered the words, "Again I say unto you, that if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father who is in heaven."

The couple isn't a member of the Church of Christian Science and they claim that they do not belong to any particular Christian sect or church, although there is an evangelical pastor with whom they are close.

Maybe they should have agreed to lovingly touch their daughter, who was known to have type II diabetes, and picked her up and taken her to professional health care specialists who would have given her the insulin that she needed instead of agreeing to recite mere words that permitted her to die through neglect.

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske tells us that state law protects parents from being charged with abuse or neglect of a child if they earnestly choose prayer as a method of treatment for a disease. However, Geske goes on to tell us that a charge of second-degree reckless homicide might be permitted.

The Neumanns' pastor, who talked on the telephone with them and helped them in their prayers the very night before their daughter drew her last breath, insists that they made no mistake that is any more egregious than those made by parents who take their children to a doctor for treatment only to have that doctor harm or kill the child through malpractice.

This pastor's ministry is adamant that mankind is in the "End Times".

It was Madeline's aunt who found out what was going on and called an emergency dispatcher to send an ambulance to her niece's house. Madeline had not seen a doctor in eight years.

"My sister-in-law, she's very religious, she believes in faith instead of doctors ...And she called my mother-in-law today ... and she explained to us that she believes her daughter's in a coma now and she's relying on faith...Please. I mean, she's refusing. She's going to fight it. ... We've been trying to get her to take her to the hospital for a week, a few days now," Leilani's sister insisted to the dispatcher from her California home on the afternoon of March 23rd, 2008.

The people with whom this writer corresponds are very predominately of the opinion that the parents should be arrested and even executed for murder.