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Social Issues

25 August 2026

Children in a Faith-Healing Sect Keep Dying. The State Lets It Happen.

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Source reporting: ProPublica

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Children in a Faith-Healing Sect Keep Dying. The State Lets It Happen.

Newborn baby Malachi lies in the lap of his mother after dying from pneumonia and bleeding lungs — preventable conditions that could have been treated in a hospital — in 2023 in Idaho. Since the 1970s, the state’s criminal and civil laws have allowed parents who belong to Followers of Christ and other faith-healing sects to pray as their children die. Obtained by ProPublica via Canyon County Sheriff A sheriff’s deputy opens the door of an Idaho farmhouse where a newborn baby has just died. It’s almost 10 p. m.

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Community angle

Ordinary Victorians should care because the state ignored a royal commission’s 2021 recommendation for First Nations healing centres while 121 Indigenous people died by suicide in the following five years.

Source: The Guardian WorldOriginal source

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