Danny Hauser is back with his parents in Minnesota where, under court order, he is undergoing a second round of chemotherapy to treat the Hodgkin's lymphoma with which he was diagnosed in January.
Although noting that the 13-year-old boy had a "horrible day" following resumption of treatment last Thursday, a family spokesperson stated that there would no longer be daily updates on Danny's condition.
As this heart-wrenching case fades from the headlines, it leaves behind a series of complex legal questions involving parental rights, children's rights, religious liberty and the permissible role of government with respect to all three.
They culminate in the very fundamental question being debated across America: Did District Court Judge John R. Rodenberg make the right decision in forcing Danny to undergo chemotherapy against his and his parents' wishes?
On May 14, Rodenberg issued a 57-page opinion explaining the reasoning behind his order. His detailed analysis reflects a caring, compassionate judge, mindful of the gravity of the issue before him and the weighty arguments advanced by the competing interests involved. While the question is an extremely close one, the feeling here is that the court reached the right result but for the wrong reason.
It is well established that parents have a constitutional right to raise their children as they see fit. The nature of that right is fundamental and extends to every aspect of childrearing, including the inculcation of religious beliefs.
Yet, despite this wide-ranging deference given to parents, government retains the right to intervene where parental conduct so deviates from minimally acceptable standards as to endanger the well-being of the child.
Another consideration, often overlooked by the courts, is that because children are citizens, too, they enjoy constitutional rights which may, at times, clash with what their parents or the government believe is required to facilitate their best interests. That children as young as 8 years of age are being tried as adults in criminal courts today accentuates the need to take their constitutional rights seriously when asserted in other contexts such as Danny Hauser's desire to reject chemotherapy out of respect for his conscientiously held religious beliefs.
Finally, the First Amendment's "establishment of religion" clause prohibits government from engaging in acts of hostility toward religion. Since Judge Rodenberg emphasized that the Hauser family's religious-based opposition to chemotherapy was sincerely held, a serious constitutional issue is raised by his use of the court's power to force that treatment on Danny.
Rodenberg cited the testimony of five physicians, including three pediatric oncologists, all of whom maintained that chemotherapy was essential to Danny's survival. Yet, by ordering it, the judge necessarily put the weight of government behind the proposition that the Hausers' religious tenets are either false or, at the very least, inferior to the position proffered by the secular witnesses. This conclusion is fraught with constitutional implications.
If Danny were three years old instead of 13, the court's order would be more easily defensible because he would then be incapable of independently and intelligently subscribing to his parents' religious beliefs. But here, Danny adamantly insisted that he did not want to undergo chemotherapy because he had adopted his parents' religious objections as his own.
Judge Rodenberg described Danny as "an extremely polite and pleasant young man" with whom he had "a very pleasant conversation" during which the boy expressed both his "strongly held" religious beliefs and their Native American origins.
Still, Rodenberg concluded that Danny lacked the capacity to refuse medical treatments "partly because of his age" and also because he has "a very limited capacity to understand his illness and the treatment recommended for it."
Danny's age, per se, should have had nothing to do with the outcome of this case. With kids far younger being deemed sufficiently mature to waive their constitutional privilege against self-incrimination and intelligently assist in their defense in criminal proceedings, the mere suggestion exposes a hypocritical, indefensible lapse in constitutional consistency.
On the other hand, if, as Rodenberg found here, Danny does not possess sufficient knowledge to fully appreciate the life-or-death issue confronting him, then the judge was right to order treatments over his objections. This, not because the boy was incapable of waiving consent to treatment, but because he was probably too immature to have his religious objections respected when they clashed with a countervailing interest of the government to protect his health and wellbeing.
But if Danny had been a more mature, better informed 13-year-old kid with similarly deeply held religious convictions, the government would have been wrong to deny him his constitutional right to reject chemotherapy even if its acquiescence would have seriously jeopardized his young life.
Danny's independent right to the free exercise of religion was the most important issue raised by this case. Unfortunately, that reality escaped Judge Rodenberg as well as the sea of reporters assigned to cover this terribly sad matter that, for two solid weeks, captivated an entire nation.
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Daniel Leddy's On The Law column appears each Tuesday on the Advance Editorial Page. His e-mail address is JudgeLeddy@si.rr.com.