An article on the TIME website yesterday (Did Homeopathic Medicine, Breast-Feeding and Veganism Kill a Baby?) tells the tragic story of a French couple sentenced to prison last week for neglect of their 11-month-old daughter, who died after they ignored a doctor's advice that the child might have pneumonia.
There are a lot of factors that make this a complicated story: the mother's unusual diet, France's bizarre anti-breastfeeding attitudes, the use of homeopathic remedies and "natural" alternative medicine. There's also that widespread (maybe instinctive) feeling that the youngest of our species are public property, in a way, and that every part of how parents raise babies is everybody's business.
The media and prosecutors seem to have blamed the parents' out-of-the-ordinary diet and health practices. Yet none of these practices should have resulted in the child's death. Breast-feeding is good for children. Vegans do not all have nutritional deficiencies. Homeopathic remedies have no active ingredients that could be harmful.
The most direct cause of this tragedy is not what the parents did differently, but what they didn't do: they allegedly ignored urgent medical advice in order to use "natural" remedies that were, unfortunately, ineffective.
I don't know these parents, or anything more than what I've read in TIME and in The Guardian, but I find it hard to believe (as the state prosecutor does) that these parents made a conscious choice to put their belief in alternative medicine above their daughter's life. More likely, these two parents were misled by others—by books, perhaps by friends and family—into thoroughly accepting the idea that modern scientific medicine is bad for you, unnatural, and maybe even morally wrong. People who accept this belief logically think that the best way to protect their childrens' health is to protect them from the dangers of scientific medicine, and to treat all doctors with mistrust.
I think it's that belief, and those who make money promoting it, who are largely to blame when children don't get the medical care they need. That belief, when sincerely held, denies parents the ability to get quality medical care they can trust.