TROUBLING: Police officers raid an Arizona home over a child with a dangerously high fever who wasn’t given necessary medical treatment.
By Alex Flores, Staff Writer
Armed Arizona police officers decided to force their way into the home of two parents who refused to take their feverish young son to a hospital. As a result, distressing questions regarding parental responsibility and potentially excessive law enforcement tactics have surfaced.
The two-year-old child’s mother, Sarah Beck, brought him to Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine on February 25 and was informed by a doctor that the child had a temperature of more than 105 degrees. The doctor believed that the child could be suffering from meningitis, but that this illness could not be tested for at the clinic. Beck was told to take her son to the hospital, but she was hesitant to do so because he wasn’t vaccinated and she feared possible repercussions.
The doctor called the state Department of Child Safety, which in turn contacted the police department in Chandler, Arizona after learning that the child hadn’t been taken to the hospital. Arizona authorities were at “the threshold at which the state is reasonable in intervening because it has an independent duty to protect the child if the parents are unwilling or unable to do so,” said Douglas Diekema, the director of education at the center for pediatric bioethics at Seattle Children’s Hospital, as well as a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
Dr. Arthur L. Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the New York University School of Medicine, agreed that the child was in a life-threatening situation. “The ethical principle is that if your child is in imminent risk of dying, and if it’s likely that medical attention could reverse that, then as a parent you don’t have the right to allow your child to die,” remarked Caplan.
Reducing parental autonomy to raise their children as they see fit may not be the best route to choose, but that two-year-old child would most likely be in an even worse critical condition otherwise.