Mom Refuses (then submits to) Chemotherapy for Son
May 27, 2009 by Julia King
I’m not sure what to make of the Minnesota mother who fled with her 13-year-old son to escape chemotherapy for his Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It would be easy to declare her absolutely crazy and be done with it. Vitamin therapy instead of chemotherapy? Come on. According to doctors, the numbers are heavily stacked in favor of traditional medicine on this one (something along the lines of 95% survival rate with chemotherapy versus 5% survival with the vitamins).
In the photos and news footage she looks like a normal woman, a loving mother, maybe a tad sure of herself, a bit too territorial (she touches her son almost as though he is an extension of her instead of simply himself). But there is no doubt in my mind that the woman loves her son – and that’s worth something (although we parents know all too well that our love, mercilessly, exists in a realm separate from our parenting skill).
Although I try, I can’t quite find the “loony” in her eyes, meaning the thing that makes her vastly different from me — or any of us who are trying to live out our values and beliefs.
Is it simply a lack of scientific understanding that allows her to disregard the advice of doctors? Most of us can’t fully grasp what’s going on in our bodies at any given moment, or what, exactly, our doctors are doing to alter them; but we can see that traditional medicine rests on a set of principles that, over time, lend themselves to honest inquiry. Yes, we’ve got an imperfect, profit-driven health care system that deserves some measure of distrust; but it’s irrational to imagine that the real problems within a traditional medical setting somehow translate into the superiority of other, less rigorously tested (or proven) alternatives.
My own worldview would have me rushing to get chemotherapy for my daughter, but as a general rule, is it wrong to believe that medical intervention is wrong? Is it wrong to submit to the rhythms of nature (or to “God”) rather than to humanity’s collective attempt to control those rhythms? In order to be moral, must we adopt each new medical “advancement” for ourselves and for our children? Is the mother’s embrace of vitamin therapy an ill-informed and stubborn belief that it will cure her son, or only the belief that the chemotherapy is immoral?
While these are all questions worth asking, the most important question involves the boy’s understanding of the situation. Does this child fully comprehend the potential (deadly) consequences of delaying or rejecting chemotherapy (in this article the boy is said to believe the chemo will kill him)? It looks to me as though he is a loyal, loving son who has absorbed well the lessons his parents have taught him – despite their erroneous content.
Because we’re human, we are entitled to be foolish. No amount of schooling or peer pressure has been able to rid our species of that trait. So maybe parenting just requires that we know our limits, that we grasp our inherent imperfection – and that we not confuse our certainty with truth. Maybe it requires that we not spoon feed our children our eccentricities, but that we let them develop their own.
(The last I heard, the woman reappeared with her son, ready to cooperate, although one presumes her return is an obedient act rather than a philosophical shift…)
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