An Indiana Case

One of the first deaths Rita discovered that was not related to Christian Science was in
Indiana. As Stauth tells the story:
4-year-old Natali Joy Mudd was found dead by detectives in her own home, with a
tumor in her eye that was almost as big as the rest of her head. At the horrific scene,
a police sergeant found horizontal trails of blood along the walls of the house. The
trails matched the height of the girls head. Natali had apparently been leaning
against the wall as she dragged herself from room to room, blinded, trying to find a
way to freedom, before the tumor killed her. (Stauth 2013)

Natalis parents belonged to the Faith Assembly Church, a Pentecostal offshoot. They
didnt believe in medical care, and they were not prosecuted because Indiana had strict
religious shield laws. Two years later, Natalis five-year-old sister died from an untreated
tumor in her stomach the size of a basketball.
The Faith Assembly Church was responsible for as many as 100 childhood deaths and for
a maternal childbirth mortality rate that was 870 times the usual rate. The most common
cause of death was infant mortality in home births; something that is now rare in
Christian Science because it now supports prenatal care and hospital births attended by
doctors.

Holding
hands, Catherine and Herbert Schaible leave the Criminal Justice Center after a probation hearing May 6, 2013, in
Philadelphia. The very religious couple, who were convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the 2009 death of their
two-year-old son because they denied him medical care, were in court because their eight-month-old son Brandon
died recently under similar circumstances. (Clem Murray/Philadelphia Inquirer/MCT)

The Faith Tabernacle Church

The Faith Tabernacle Church is a sect that has been responsible for deaths from
exorcisms in several countries. One believer strangled her five-year-old son to death and
kept his body for several days hoping for his resurrection. One couple in Pennsylvania
lost six children, all under the age of two, to untreated illnesses. A measles epidemic
involving 491 people resulted in the deaths of six children. One couple was prosecuted for
letting their sixteen-year-old daughter die of untreated diabetes, but their sentence was
only two years probation and community service at a hospital (and the hospital didnt
want them).

The Pediatrics Article

In 1998, pediatrician Seth Asser and Rita Swan published an article in the medical
journal Pediatrics titled Child Fatalities from Religion-motivated Medical Neglect
(Asser and Swan 1998). They documented 172 faith-healing deaths over a twenty-year
period, involving twenty-three different sects in thirty-four states. The true numbers
were undoubtedly much higher, since these cases were collected informally rather than
systematically and some deaths are never reported. In most of these cases the prognosis
would have been excellent with medical care. Asser later characterized some of the cases
as babies literally being tortured to death. In one case, a mother died in childbirth after
the infants head had been at the vaginal opening for more than sixteen hours. The
infants corpse was so foul smelling that it was inconceivable that anyone attending the
delivery could have not noticed.
In 1988, the American Academy of Pediatrics had called for elimination of religious
exemption laws, and in 1983 the federal government had removed religious exemptions
from federal mandate; but at the time of the study there were only five states that had no
religious exemptions either to civil abuse and neglect charges or criminal charges.