Newborn Dies in Albuquerque as Parents Pray. Opinions please

[larrymeyer]

http://www.officer.com/online/articl...ion=1&id=47406

Newborn Dies in Albuquerque as Parents Pray

Posted: Monday, July 6, 2009
Updated: July 6th, 2009 11:37 AM GMT-05:00

By Hailey Heinz Journal Staff Writer Albuquerque Journal

The parents say their infant's death was the will of God.

Albuquerque police are calling it a "suspicious" death, and the District Attorney's Office must decide if a crime was committed.

A woman attending a church conference in Albuquerque with her husband didn't call for medical treatment while giving birth to twins in a hotel room, even as one of the newborns struggled to breathe, according to a search warrant affidavit.

That child died while church members gathered in prayer. The other child survived, but the parents declined to take the infant to be checked at a hospital.

According to a search warrant affidavit, Samuel and Tammy Kaufman told police at the scene they did not believe in man's medicine, only God, and that their child's death was God's will.

The case could set up a classic clash between child welfare laws and religious beliefs.

According to the affidavit, Tammy Kaufman was pregnant with twins and planned to have them at home. She went into labor suddenly on June 25 at the Sandia Courtyard Hotel and Convention Center at Eubank and Lomas, where the couple was attending a church conference.

According to the search warrant affidavit, the Kaufmans did not seek medical help and only called for rescue personnel to "collect the body" after one of the twins died.

A fter rescue personnel arrived, the Kaufmans told them the twins were both born alive in the early hours of June 26, but that one of them was "in distress and was struggling to breathe."

Someone in the hotel room where the children were born then called other members of the church group and told them to pray. About 30 minutes later, the other twin also started having trouble breathing, according to the affidavit.

Church group members gathered and started to pray, according to the affidavit, and the second twin's condition eventually improved, while the first twin stopped making noise, stopped breathing and died.

The search warrant is to collect medical evidence. It does not give a hometown for the Kaufmans.

After the child's death, the Kaufmans called rescue personnel to collect the body. A detective on scene advised them to take the living infant to a hospital for an evaluation, but the Kaufmans would not let go of the newborn for treatment, saying they did not believe in man, only God, according to the affidavit.

The Kaufmans could not be reached for comment Friday, and it is unclear what church they belonged to. A group identified as the Church of God had a conference scheduled at Sandia on the day the children were born.

The child's body has been sent to the Office of the Medical Investigator, and investigators are awaiting the results of an autopsy, according to the affidavit.

District Attorney spokesman Pat Davis said the DA's Office is aware of the case but has not been formally presented with the police report.

A recent case in Minnesota garnered national attention when the parents of 13-yearold Daniel Hauser initially refused court-ordered chemotherapy for the boy's Hodgkins lymphoma. The condition has a 90 percent cure rate in children if treated with chemotherapy and radiation, but doctors said Hauser had a 5 percent chance of survival without those treatments.

Hauser's parents cited religious beliefs and side effects of the chemotherapy in opting for natural healing practices. The boy and his mother initially fled Minnesota, but then returned and agreed to the treatments.

[CerealKiller]

It's really sad to hear about something like this. Being religious is fine. Be a moron and blaming your religion for it is not okay. Obviously God made man to be an intelligent species or he wouldn't have given us a brain with which to retain knowledge passed down from previous generations.

They need to take the second child away before he dies from the measels or something any normal parent would have their child vaccinated for, or before he chokes on a crayon and they start praying instead of preforming the hymich (sp?) maneuver. and they really should be brought up on charges for letting a baby die when it could have been taken to a hospital and saved. It's scary enough people with this mindset are reproducing.

[Derek]

It's very sad these days to hear about infant mortality because of our highly advanced medical technology.

I have mixed feelings as to whether these parents should be charged or have thier second child taken. They obviously choose to live thier lives a certain way and they felt that thier actions were the most appropriate for the situation. I would not even think of acting the same way but in this country people are allowed to choose how they live. As much as I or anyone else might not agree, they felt they were doing the best thing.

There was a girl in high school two years older than me who passed away when she was 17 because she was sick and her/her parents were of the belief that it was "God's will" and modern medicine was not an acceptable practice. Should her parents be charged?

I just have mixed feelings/not sure where I stand on this one.

~ Derek

[shefearsnothing]

I know someone who falls pretty close to this with her kids. She doesn't vaccinate them either. One of the peds she was using actually refused to quit seeing her kids because of it. (I guess she was taking the kids SOMEtimes) Some of her own relatives have had serious concerns because of her refusal to seek medical treatment at times. She insisted on relying on prayer alone.

[CerealKiller]

She insisted on relying on prayer alone.

That's the frustrating part. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that that's not going to cut it. I wonder if thinking like that qualifies as some kind of psychosis?

I can pray and pray and pray till I'm blue in the face for my rent to pay itself, but if I don't go to work then I'm gonna be living under a bridge.

God gave people a brain for a reason. So they can quit bothering him with problems they can fix themelves.

[viva la ben]

It's sad that an infant died, especially with the current level of technology society offers.
Now someone has to grow up without the bond of having a twin, because their parent's faith selectively excluded modern medicine.

[autotech6506]

I would like to think of myself as a pretty strong christian but this is wrong. There is trusting God and then there is idiocy. When my wife is pregnant I'm going to take her to a place where someone qualified to deliver babies will do it. It's situations like this that make people believe that christians are just religous yahoos who are out of thier mind.

[1861]

My whole family has been praying for my older brother for a week now . He is in ICU in medically induced coma suffering from a heat stroke .
we figure let the doctors do what they do best and we do what we do best .

[larrymeyer]

My whole family has been praying for my older brother for a week now . He is in ICU in medically induced coma suffering from a heat stroke .
we figure let the doctors do what they do best and we do what we do best .

Sorry to hear this My prays will be added to your.

[larrymeyer]

I know someone who falls pretty close to this with her kids. She doesn't vaccinate them either. One of the peds she was using actually refused to quit seeing her kids because of it. (I guess she was taking the kids SOMEtimes) Some of her own relatives have had serious concerns because of her refusal to seek medical treatment at times. She insisted on relying on prayer alone.

What happens if someone else's child gets sick say measles and dies because she refuses to vaccinate her kids. Is this not running the risk to your children ?