Victim Of Faith Healing Wants Parents Prosecuted

[progressoid]

Permanently disabled because she was denied medical care as a child, Mariah Walton wants her faith healing parents prosecuted.

Walton, 20, is usually bedridden, and when she’s not, she has to carry around an oxygen tank. She has had screws in her bones to hold her breathing device in place, and she has no options for recovery besides a risky heart and lung transplant.

Yet all of this could have been prevented if Walton’s faith healing parents had simply taken her to a doctor when she was a child.

Walton has a condition called pulmonary hypertension. Her situation could have been prevented if doctors had closed the small congenital hole in her heart in her infancy or childhood.

However, Walton’s parents were fundamentalist Mormons who went off the grid in northern Idaho in the 1990s and refused to take their children to doctors, believing that illnesses could be healed through faith and the power of prayer.

...

As a child Walton grew sicker and sicker. Her parents would pray over her, and rub rancid olive oil over her body, but refused to seek medical attention for their sick daughter. Finally, in her late teens, Walton managed to see a doctor about her poor health. But it was too late, the damage to her heart and lungs had been done, and it was permanent.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2016/04/victim-of-faith-healing-wants-parents-prosecuted/#sthash.MYln0CWy.gbpl

Longer, in depth article here: