Religion-based medical neglect is not a new issue. Courts have been dealing with such cases at least since 1898.
Rita Swan, founder of a nonprofit group based in Sioux City, Iowa, has tracked 57 criminal cases like that of Richard and Agnes Wiebe since 1982, in which prosecutors say children have died of preventable illnesses because of family religious conviction.
Authorities say the Wiebes' 11-month-old daughter died of untreated meningitis last July. Forty-three of the cases Swan tracked resulted in conviction of the parents, and only seven ended in acquittals. The rest were either dismissed because of "religious exemption" statutes or have not yet come to trial.
Six of the convictions were overturned on appeal. A great many of the cases involve the Christian Science church, the largest religious group with blanket reservations about medical care.
"Juries have always ruled against Christian Scientists, since 1902," Swan said, herself a former Christian Scientist whose son, Matthew, died of meningitis in Detroit in 1977.
Swan said that Christian Science practitioners repeatedly assured her and her husband, Doug, that Matthew was improving.
After two weeks of serious illness, the Swans took their child to the hospital, where he lingered in an intensive care unit for a week before he died. After he was admitted to the hospital, the practitioners refused to pray for him, she said.
The Swans subsequently left the church and sued it for wrongful death, but the lawsuit was dismissed.
Another couple filed a successful suit against the church after their 11-year-old son died of untreated diabetes, Swan said. A jury awarded them $14 million in compensatory and punitive damages, though a judge later lowered the award to $1.5 million.
The church, for its part, maintains that medical decisions are left up to the individual and are not imposed by church leaders.
"We have to act responsibly," said Kim Robert Walker, a Claremont spokesman for the church. "Most state laws allow for people to turn to spiritual means for prayer and healing. But that doesn't mean that if you feel prayers aren't being effective, that you neglect the child."
When Walker's own son broke his arm playing football in seventh grade, the boy wanted to pray.
"We prayed earnestly in that situation. And he was alleviated from any sense of pain," Walker said. "But the arm was not resetting or being healed, and we felt we should have the arm set and put in a cast. So we did."
Courts have long recognized the idea that religious freedom does not allow parents to impose their views on a child to the child's detriment.
"Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves," the U.S. Supreme Court wrote in 1944. "But it does not follow they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children."
But in many states, religious exemption laws make it hard for prosecutors to file abuse charges in faith-healing cases.
Swan founded Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty, or Child, in 1983 to fight such laws, and she says that though parents have been charged at least 57 times in the past 20 years, prosecutors have opted not to file charges in many more cases.
Swan published a study in the journal Pediatrics documenting 172 neglect-based child deaths among faith-healing groups from 1975 to 1995. That figure does not include numbers from the Followers of Christ, an Oregon sect that was investigated in 1998. Authorities looking into the death of a boy from juvenile-onset diabetes found a cemetery with 12 children's graves, and another that contained 78, Swan said.
"There are a lot more than we know of," she said.
Oregon's religious exemption law prevented prosecutors from filing charges. The next year it was repealed, making it the fifth state to repeal such a law in the past 10 years.